The Hubble Space Telescope has captured a new image of the Twin Jet Nebula in all its sublime glory, offering a detailed glimpse of its glimmering shells and bursts of expanding gas.
The Twin Jet Nebula, which also goes by the name PN M2-9, is a bipolar planetary nebula, meaning it has two stars -- rather than the typical one -- at the heart of its binary star system. The picture, taken by the Space Telescope Imaging Spectograph (STIS), shows two iridescent bulbs of material stretching outwards from its central star system, while two jets of gas stream from within it at speeds exceeding one million kilometres per hour.
The glowing shells you can see in the image show the final lightshow of a dying star, after ejecting its outer layers -- leaving just its ghostly, pulsing shape.
Astronomers have found that the two stars in the Twin Jet Nebula's pair both have about the same mass as the Sun. Whereas the bigger star is in the final stages of its life, its smaller companion is an even further evolved small white dwarf.
It's believed that the distinctive wings of the Nebula, which is thought to have been created just 1,200 years 'ago' relative to Earth, is probably caused by the movement of the stars around each other -- and they're still growing. The vein-like blue plumes you can see stretching horizontally from the wings are violent gas jets, pulled by the wayward gravity of the binary system.
The stars circle each other around every 100 years, allowing the white dwarf to syphon off gas from its neighbour, creating a disc of material shrouding the stars, too fine to be captured by Hubble.
First discovered by German astronomer Rudolph Minkowski in 1947, the Twin Jet Nebula has been snapped before, by the Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2, with the image released in 1997.
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
