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When stars like the sun burn all their fuel, they lose their outer layers and the star’s core shrinks. Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, astronomers discovered a bubble of superheated gas at the center of one of these effusive stars, the planetary nebula IC 4593.
The IC 4593 nebula is located in the Milky Way galaxy about 7,800 light years from Earth. It is the most distant planetary nebula discovered by the Chandra telescope.
In this new image from IC 4593, the bubble detected by the Chandra telescope is gas heated to over a million degrees.
This composite image also contains visible light data from the Hubble Space Telescope. The pink areas in the Hubble image are a superposition of radiation from a colder gas made up of a combination of nitrogen, oxygen and hydrogen, while green radiation is primarily associated with nitrogen.
Although IC 4593 is called a planetary nebula, this class of objects has nothing to do with planets. The name of the cosmic phenomenon was given about two centuries ago because the nebulae looked like a disk of a planet when viewed through a small telescope. Indeed, a planetary nebula forms after a star’s interior about the mass of the Sun shrinks and its outer layers expand and cool. This happens during the “death” of a star, at the end of its life cycle (which however can last for billions of years). As for the Sun, its outer layers could extend to the orbit of Venus during its red giant phase for several billion years in the future.
In addition to the hot gas, this study also found evidence of a point X-ray source at the center of IC 4593. It has much more energy than a hot gas bubble. A point source could come from a star that has shed its outer layers to form a planetary nebula or from a possible companion star in this system.
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