Free Astronomy Magazine September-October 2020

26 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2020 SPACE CHRONICLES York, leader of the new study. “As I was downloading the resulting im- ages, I felt like a kid in a candy store.” The new Hubble images re- veal in vivid detail how both nebu- lae are splitting themselves apart on extremely short timescales — allow- ing astronomers to see changes over the past couple of decades. In par- ticular, Hubble’s broad multi-wave- length views of each nebula are helping the researchers to trace the A s nuclear fusion engines, most stars live placid lives for hundreds of millions to bil- lions of years. But near the end of their lives they can turn into crazy whirligigs, puffing off shells and jets of hot gas. Astronomers have used Hubble to dissect such crazy fireworks happen- ing in two planetary nebulae, NGC 6302 e NGC 7027. The researchers have found unprecedented levels of complexity and rapid changes in the jets and gas bubbles blasting off of the stars at the center of each neb- ula. Hubble is now allowing the re- searchers to converge on an under- standing of the mechanisms under- lying this chaos. The space telescope has imaged these objects before, but not for many years and never before with the Wide Field Camera 3 instrument across its full wavelength range — making observations in near-ultravi- olet to near-infrared light. “These new multi-wavelength Hubble ob- servations provide the most compre- hensive view to date of both of these spectacular nebulae,” said Joel Kastner of the Rochester Insti- tute of Technology, Rochester, New by NASA/ESA Stars puffing off gas and dust yield new revelations T his image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope depicts NGC 6302, commonly known as the Butterfly Nebula. NGC 6302 lies within our Milky Way galaxy, roughly 3800 light-years away in the constel- lation of Scorpius. The glowing gas was once the star's outer layers, but has been expelled over about 2200 years. The butterfly shape stretches for more than two light-years, which is about half the distance from the Sun to the nearest star, Proxima Cen- tauri. New observations of the object have found unprecedented levels of complexity and rapid changes in the jets and gas bubbles blasting off of the star at the centre of the nebula. [NASA, ESA, and J. Kastner (RIT)]