A Rare Gourd

1 min read

Gary Daines

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope captured an uncommon sight – the death of a low-mass star – in this image of the Calabash Nebula released on Feb. 3, 2017.

Here, we can see the star going through a rapid transformation from a red giant to a planetary nebula, during which it blows its outer layers of gas and dust out into the surrounding space. The recently ejected material is spat out in opposite directions with immense speed — the gas shown in yellow is moving close to a million kilometers an hour.

Astronomers rarely capture a star in this phase of its evolution because it occurs within the blink of an eye – in astronomical terms. Over the next thousand years the nebula is expected to evolve into a fully-fledged planetary nebula.