Telescope captures turning point in star's death

This photo, taken at different wavelengths, shows the surrounding ring-shaped region of gas and dust cast off by the star

March 20, 1998 
Web posted at: 10:51 a.m. EDT (1051 GMT)  

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- The Hubble Space Telescope has captured a turning point in the death of a sun-like star: the instant when the hydrogen and helium at the star's core are flung into interstellar space to create more heavenly bodies. 

"This is probably very much like what will happen to the sun," astronomer William Latter said Thursday as the new Hubble images were released by the Space Telescope Science Institute. 

However, our sun is much younger than the star snapped in the new pictures, and will not approach this phase for about 4.5 billion years, Latter said in a telephone interview from the California Institute of Technology. 

This brief period in the stellar death process actually lasts about 1,000 Earth years, a mere blink in cosmological time. 

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When a star starts to die, Latter said, the nuclear fuel at its heart runs out, and a very dense, cool shell of hydrogen molecules is deposited around the star. This molecular shell cannot be seen by the naked eye, but Hubble's infrared camera was able to snap its image. 

The dying star in question, known as NGC7027 and located 3,000 light-years from the sun in the direction of the constellation Cygnus the Swan, is seen in the new pictures as a glowing white ball surround by red wisps of the dissipating molecular shell. 

The molecular shell is atomized and the resulting atoms are flung into space as the most primitive building blocks for other stars, planets and any life that may form on them, Latter said. 

Two planetary nebulae emerge from wrappings of gas and dust like butterflies breaking out of their cocoons

"What's new about these images is we're able to see a very thin transition between the ionized region and the formerly invisible atmosphere on the star," he said. 

Also on Thursday, the telescope institute released images of two other dying stars that look like butterflies emerging from their cocoons. 

These two -- known as the Cotton Candy nebula and the Silkworm nebula -- show the moribund stars blowing off shells of gas that surrounded them after their nuclear cores were exhausted. 

The gaseous shells give the stars their butterfly-wing shape, astronomers said in a statement. 

Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.

 

Related sites:

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• Space Telescope Science Institute 
• Hubble Captures the Shrouds of Dying Stars 

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