The Hubble Space Telescope is once again giving us a glimpse of something that is thousands of light-years away from the Earth.
NASA shared images of the Egg Nebula as the star inside it is dying.
The nebula is located in the constellation Cygnus and is 1,000 light-years away. It has a dense cloud of dust surrounding a central star, “like a ‘yolk’ nestled within a dark, opaque ‘egg white.’ ”
The agency said it is the “first, youngest, and closest pre-planetary nebula ever discovered.”
The images allow scientists to test their theories of late-stage stellar evolution.
The stage that the Egg Nebula is in is called the pre-planetary stage and lasts “only” a few thousand years. Scientists can study the ejection of the fuel from the dying star.
“The symmetrical patterns captured by Hubble are too orderly to result from a violent explosion like a supernova. Instead, the arcs, lobes, and central dust cloud likely stem from a coordinated series of poorly understood sputtering events in the carbon-enriched core of the dying star,” NASA said.
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