The NASA / ESA Hubble Space Telescope demonstrates its full range of capabilities with two new images of planetary nebulae. The one that has caught our attention the most is that of the Butterfly Nebula or NGC 6302 , a young nearby planetary nebula, located about 3,400 light-years away from Earth.
The Butterfly Nebula alongside NGC 7027 are among the dustiest planetary nebulae known and both contain unusually large masses of gas, making them particularly special to be studied in parallel by scientists.
The American astronomer Edward Emerson Barnard was the one who drew and described this nebula back in 1907 . Its central star is one of the hottest objects in the universe, and now, thanks to new images from the Hubble telescope, researchers have found unprecedented levels of complexity and rapid changes in the jets and bubbles of gas emerging from the stars. in the center of each nebula.
“These new multi-wavelength Hubble observations provide the most comprehensive view to date of these spectacular nebulae,” says Joel Kastner of the Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, New York, leader of the new study. “When I was downloading the resulting images, I felt like a kid in a candy store.”
In the video we can see how the nebulae are moving apart on extremely short timescales, allowing astronomers to see the changes in the last two decades. In this case, astronomers suspect that at the heart of each nebula there were two stars orbiting each other. Evidence for such a central “dynamic duo” comes from the unusual shapes of these nebulae, both NGC 7027 (located about 3,000 light-years away) and the Butterfly Nebula. Each has a pinched, dusty waist and polar lobes or outlets, as well as other more complex symmetrical patterns.
Referencia: Joel H. Kastner et al. First Results from a Panchromatic HST/WFC3 Imaging Study of the Young, Rapidly Evolving Planetary Nebulae NGC 7027 and NGC 6302, Galaxies (2020). DOI: 10.3390/galaxies8020049
