Astronomy Picture of the Day

Discover the cosmos!
Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is
featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.

2020 June 30

Bright Planetary Nebula NGC 7027 from Hubble

Image Credit:
NASA,
ESA,
Joel Kastner
(RIT)
et al.;
Processing:
Alyssa Pagan
(STScI)

Explanation:
What created this unusual planetary nebula?

NGC 7027 is one of the smallest, brightest, and most unusually shaped
planetary nebulas known.

Given its expansion rate,
NGC 7027 first started expanding,
as visible from Earth, about 600 years ago.

For much of its history, the planetary nebula has been expelling shells,
as seen in blue in the
featured image.

In modern times, though, for
reasons unknown,
it began ejecting gas and dust (seen in red) in specific directions
that created a new pattern that seems to have four corners.

These shells and patterns have been mapped in impressive detail by
recent images from the
Wide Field Camera 3 onboard the
Hubble Space Telescope.

What lies at the nebula’s center is unknown, with
one hypothesis holding it to be a
close binary star system
where one star sheds gas onto an erratic disk orbiting the other star.

NGC 7027, about 3,000
light years
away, was first discovered in 1878 and
can be seen
with a standard backyard telescope toward the
constellation of the Swan
(Cygnus).

Tomorrow’s picture: inverted Earth

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Robert Nemiroff
(MTU) &
Jerry Bonnell (UMCP)
NASA Official: Phillip Newman
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