Nebulae – The Most Beautiful Places in the Universe

18th October 2020

By: Haris Ahmad

Nebulae are giant clouds of gas and dust in space. Some of them may have formed due to the explosion of stars into supernovae. Nebulae are places where stars form and the Sun also formed from the elementary particles in a Nebula. In our universe, there are countless Nebulae with some visible to the naked eye in a clear night sky as well.  

This is the second blog of my ‘Nebulae – The Most Beautiful Places in the Universe’ series. In this blog, I will highlight one of my favorite Nebula, The Dumbbell Nebula.

 

The Dumbbell Nebula was discovered by Charles Messier in 1746. It resides approximately 1200 light-years away from Earth in the Vulpecula Constellation.

Credits: NASA/ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

This Nebula is also known as M27 and was the first planetary Nebula that we ever discovered. It isn’t a planetary Nebula because it hosts planets but it is classified as a planetary Nebula because of its planet-like appearance when viewed by smaller telescopes. Just like the Crab Nebula, this Nebula is also the result of an old star that sheds its layers in a Supernova explosion.

 

This Nebula hosts many layers of gas and dust as we can see in the image. Some point at the stars inside the range of the Nebula whilst some remain as isolated clouds. The sizes of the clouds of gases in the Dumbbell Nebula range from 17 billion to 56 billion km. The shapes and sizes of these clouds change as the Nebula expands due to inertia from the explosion. Moreover, such clouds have been discovered in other nearby Nebulae as well which suggests that it’s a universal evolutionary scheme.