April 10 (By Karin Zeitvogel for RIA Novosti) - Scientists at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) have released what they call an “unusually good picture” of a star 3,300 light years from Earth taken by the ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, that is putting on a show of color and light as it dies.
“What you’re looking at is an old star that has blown off some of its atmosphere into space, and is now surrounded by a big bubble of glowing gas,” Richard Hook, a spokesman for the ESO, told RIA Novosti.
The glowing green cloud of gas is called a planetary nebula, and is part of the lifecycle of all stars that are the size of the sun or larger.
“The sun will do this in a few billion years,” Hook said.
Oxygen gives the gas bubble its green color, while the blue-white glow next to the green cloud is the “very hot center of the star, which will slowly cool down and die,” he added.
The dying star was discovered in the late 19th century, in the Scutum constellation, Hook said.
ESO released the image of this particular planetary nebula, called IC1295, because “it’s an interesting and unusually good picture of an object that hasn’t been studied much,” Hook said.
“Not even Hubble has taken a picture of this planetary nebula,” he said, referring to NASA’s space telescope that has beamed back spectacular pictures of stars, planets and galaxies for the past 20 years from its orbit around Earth.
