The Hubble Telescope’s latest photo of the Necklace Nebula.
Is this an oasis in space? A green field? It’s a lot like that. NASA has named it the Necklace Nebula, describing it as a “cosmic diamond necklace. It is 15,000 light-years from Earth, in the constellation Sagitta.
This nebula was born about 10,000 years ago. The larger of the two stars, which are close together and orbiting each other, aged and expanded, and began to absorb material from the smaller star. The smaller star is not completely consumed, but maintains its orbit and continues to orbit, which causes the larger star to rotate faster and faster.
The active and intense interaction between the two stars causes a lot of material and gas to be ejected into the space around them, forming the oval-shaped region seen in the photo. These “diamonds” are actually clumps of dense gas. The gas in the area enclosed by the “diamonds” appears uniformly green, so it also looks like an oasis in space.
The small white dot in the middle of the “green field” in the photo is the two stars that produced the nebula. Because they are so close together, they look like a dot in the photo. They are still circling each other, and one orbit takes about as long as a day on Earth.
This is a new Hubble Telescope photo of the Necklace Nebula. Thanks to more advanced processing techniques, this new photo is more colorful than the one taken in 2011.
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