SPACE.com -- Hubble Dazzles: Striking New Close-up of Dumbbell Nebula

Hubble's new close-up image of the Dumbbell Nebula reveals knots of material.

A previously taken ground-based image of the Dumbbell Nebula reveals the shape that led to the name.

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	Hubble Dazzles: Striking New Close-up of Dumbbell Nebula By SPACE.com Staff posted: 07:00 am ET 10 February 2003

CLOSE-UP OF M27, THE DUMBBELL NEBULA

The Hubble Space Telescope has taken a closer look at a remarkable space structure called the Dumbbell Nebula. The image reveals a flurry of glowing knots that appear to be streaking through space, the result of a dying star's last gasp.

The Dumbbell is within our Milky Way Galaxy and relatively nearby, at a little more than 1,200 light-years away. It is a planetary nebula, a category of objects that has nothing to do with planets but was so-named because early, crude telescopes could only resolve the objects well enough to make them look like the fuzzy outer planets of our own solar system.

The colorful gas and dust in the nebula are the remains of a star that has cast off its outer layers and is near death. The nebula, also known as Messier 27 (M27), was the first planetary nebula ever discovered. French astronomer Charles Messier spied it in 1764.

The nebula's newly spotted knots come in various shapes. Some look like fingers pointing at the central dying star, located just off the upper left of the image; others are isolated clouds, with or without tails. Their sizes typically range from 11 billion to 35 billion miles (17-56 billion kilometers), which is several times larger than the distance from the Sun to Pluto, astronomers said. Each contains as much mass as three earths.

The knots are forming at the interface between the hot cool portion of the nebula. This area of temperature differentiation moves outward from the central star as the nebula evolves.

Dense knots of gas and dust seem to be a natural part of the evolution of planetary nebulae. They form in the early stages, and their shape changes as the nebula expands. Similar knots have been discovered in other nearby planetary nebulae that are all part of the same evolutionary scheme.

This image, released today, was created by the Hubble Heritage Team at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), which operates Hubble for NASA and the European Space Agency.

The image was taken by Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 in November 2001, by Bob O'Dell of Vanderbilt University and collaborators. The filters used to create this color image show oxygen in blue, hydrogen in green and a combination of sulfur and nitrogen emission in red.