File:Cometary Knots Around A Dying Star - GPN-2000-001370.jpg
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Summary
[edit]DescriptionCometary Knots Around A Dying Star - GPN-2000-001370.jpg |
English: These gigantic, tadpole-shaped objects are probably the result of a dying star's last gasps. Dubbed "cometary knots" because their glowing heads and gossamer tails resemble comets, the gaseous objects probably were formed during a star's final stages of life. Hubble astronomer C. Robert O'Dell and graduate student Kerry P. Handron of Rice University in Houston, Texas discovered thousands of these knots with the Hubble Space Telescope while exploring the Helix nebula, the closest planetary nebula to Earth at 450 light-years away in the constellation Aquarius. Although ground-based telescopes have revealed such objects, astronomers have never seen so many of them. The most visible knots all lie along the inner edge of the doomed star's ring, trillions of miles away from the star's nucleus. Although these gaseous knots appear small, they're actually huge. Each gaseous head is at least twice the size of our solar system; each tail stretches for 100 billion miles, about 1,000 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun. Astronomers theorize that the doomed star spews hot, lower-density gas from its surface, which collides with cooler, higher-density gas that had been ejected 10,000 years before. The crash fragments the smooth cloud surrounding the star into smaller, denser finger-like droplets, like dripping paint.This image was taken in August, 1994 with Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2. The red light depicts nitrogen emission ([NII] 6584A); green, hydrogen (H-alpha, 6563A); and blue, oxygen (5007A). |
Date | |
Source | Great Images in NASA Description |
Author | NASA Robert O Dell Kerry P. Handron Rice University, Houston Texas |
This image or video was catalogued by Space Telescope Science Institute of the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) under Photo ID: GPN-2000-001370 and Alternate ID: PR96-13B. This tag does not indicate the copyright status of the attached work. A normal copyright tag is still required. See Commons:Licensing. Other languages:
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[edit]Public domainPublic domainfalsefalse |
This file is in the public domain because it was created by NASA and ESA. NASA Hubble material (and ESA Hubble material prior to 2009) is copyright-free and may be freely used as in the public domain without fee, on the condition that only NASA, STScI, and/or ESA is credited as the source of the material. This license does not apply if ESA material created after 2008 or source material from other organizations is in use. The material was created for NASA by Space Telescope Science Institute under Contract NAS5-26555, or for ESA by the Hubble European Space Agency Information Centre. Copyright statement at hubblesite.org or 2008 copyright statement at spacetelescope.org. For material created by the European Space Agency on the spacetelescope.org site since 2009, use the {{ESA-Hubble}} tag. |
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current | 09:53, 2 May 2015 | 1,793 × 2,343 (4.61 MB) | Jcpag2012 (talk | contribs) | crop from white border at the right | |
09:23, 2 May 2015 | 1,796 × 2,343 (4.56 MB) | Jcpag2012 (talk | contribs) | remove borders | ||
04:55, 9 April 2009 | 1,805 × 2,361 (3.41 MB) | BotMultichillT (talk | contribs) | {{Information |Description={{en|1=These gigantic, tadpole-shaped objects are probably the result of a dying star's last gasps. Dubbed "cometary knots" because their glowing heads and gossamer tails resemble comets, the gaseous objects probably were formed |
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