Hubble Catches the Death of a Star!
posted in Amazing Facts, Outer Space |
The Hubble Space Telescope is still proving helpful, they are capturing a new round of amazing pictures with its camera. NASA released new pictures of a dying star a white dwarf that is shown in the form of a bright dot at the center of nebula NGC 2440—that was once similar to the sun.
Low- to medium-size stars like the sun usually end their life as white dwarfs. Once most of a star’s hydrogen gets converted to helium, the star enters the red giant phase, finally throwing the outer material to form a nebula of stellar debris. The hot core left behind is called a white dwarf.
Spied by the telescope’s Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2, this white dwarf is 4,000 light-years away from the Earth. It is also one of the hottest known, with a surface temperature of around 400,000°F (200,000°C).
Ultraviolet light that comes from the dying star is what light’s up the gaseous matter that gets cast off from the star’s core. Our sun will also burn out and become a white dwarf surrounded by a vivid nebula but this will not happen for another five billion years.