Two powerful space telescopes turned their gaze towards The Cat’s Eye Nebulaa planetary nebula 4400 light years away from Earth in the constellation Draco. The new images reveal amazing details of what happens as a star nears the end of its evolutionary life cycle.
What is it?
The Cat’s Eye Nebula is known as a planetary nebulabut that name is somewhat misleading, since these clouds of ionized gas have nothing to do with planets. These nebulae appeared spherical through early telescopes, leading astronomers to believe that they may resemble the gas giants of our solar system.
Today we know that these colorful objects are massive shells of gas being released from stars in the final phase. As stars begin to run out of hydrogen, the fuel needed for nuclear fusion, the outer fusion pressure decreases, causing the stars’ gaseous outer layers to contract. Upon contraction, the atoms in these gases begin to collide and release energy, causing them to expand outward into the colorful nebulae seen in the case of the Cat’s Eye Nebula.
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Why is it amazing?
The combined observations of Euclid and Hubble Space telescopes help “reveal the remarkable complexity of stellar death in this object,” NASA wrote in a statement which comes with the picture. While Hubble was able to zoom in for a close-up of the central shell of the nebula, Euclid captured a wider image that reveals a larger halo of gases expanding out into space. This halo was ejected from the star at a much earlier stage, before the main nebula formed.
Euclid’s wide vision also reveals thousands of distant galaxies in the background behind the nebula, providing a glimpse of the true vastness of space that space telescopes such as Euclid and Hubble reveal to astronomers.
