Helix Nebula
A telescope in Chile has photographed a nearby planetary nebula, which shines like a large golden eye.
The image reveals the Helix Nebula, lying about 700 light-years away from Earth in the constellation of Aquarius. European Southern Observatory’s VISTA telescope, one of the instruments at ESO’s Paranal Observatory, has taken the picture in infrared light.
Nebula is a region or cloud of interstellar dust and gas appearing in the space formed as a result of exhaustion of the star to its hydrogen fuel. Moreover, radiation coming out of the dying star causes the dust and gas envelope to glow.
According to the researchers, the dying star that is the basis of Helix Nebula is going to become a white dwarf i.e. a super dense object having the ability to pack a huge amount of material into a small object such sun’s worth of material into a sphere of the size of the Earth and according to researchers the star is the tiny blue dot at the center of the picture.
In Helix nebula, dust, ionized material and molecular gas are arrayed in an intricate, flowerlike pattern in which the main ring is about 2 light years across. However, the flimsy material from the nebula spreads out at least 4 light years ago.
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