Hubble Zooms in on the Mysterious Egg Nebula, and It’s More Spectacular Than Ever

The Hubble Space Telescope has captured a spectacular image of the Egg Nebula, a dying star system around 1,000 light-years away.

NASA and the European Space Agency published the image yesterday, revealing a dynamic landscape of light and newly spewed-out stardust on a dark, glittering background. The Egg Nebula, or CRL 2688, is the earliest, nearest, and youngest pre-planetary nebula known to science, and Hubble is able to reveal complex features that indicate what it’s up to. Studying it sheds rare light on the end of stars’ lives, even though the Egg Nebula consists of an early chapter of this old age.

It’s just a phase

As the name suggests, this type of nebula will eventually transform into a planetary nebula, the formation of dust and gas created from material expelled by a dying star similar to our Sun (despite the name, it has nothing to do with planets).

At the center of the Egg Nebula sits a star covered by a dust cloud. The star spewed out this dust a few centuries ago, and light seeps out of it via a polar “eye.†The entire nebula gleams with the glow it reflects from the star. “Twin beams from the dying star illuminate fast-moving polar lobes that pierce a slower, older series of concentric arcs,†reads a Hubble statement. “Their shapes and motions suggest gravitational interactions with one or more hidden companion stars, all buried deep within the thick disc of stardust.â€

While Sun-like stars run out of helium and hydrogen fuel, they lose their external layers, and the uncovered core heats up enough to ionize (when something turns into one or more ions) nearby gas. This produces the bright structures like those in the Helix, Stingray, and Butterfly planetary nebulae. The Egg Nebula, however, hasn’t quite gotten there yet. It’s undergoing the short and transitional pre-planetary stage that’s just a few millennia long, providing researchers with the perfect opportunity to investigate the process of expulsion.

Mysterious sputtering events

“The symmetrical patterns captured by Hubble are too orderly to result from a violent explosion like a supernova. Instead, the arcs, lobes, and central dust cloud likely stem from a coordinated series of poorly understood sputtering events in the carbon-enriched core of the dying star,†reads the statement. “Aged stars like these forged and released the dust that eventually seeded future star systems, such as our own solar system, which coalesced into Earth and other rocky planets 4.5 billion years ago.â€

Hubble’s recently processed image joins a host of other visuals it has captured over the years and represents the nebula’s most detailed snapshot to date. The telescope’s greatly detailed view means astronomers can compare images of different ages to analyze the evolution of the tiny features of the Egg Nebula’s dust shell. This furthers more accurate planetary nebulae simulations, which also enable researchers to precisely calculate the advancement of a variety of comparable stellar explosions.