25th 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 third blog of my ‘Nebulae –
The Most Beautiful Places in the Universe’ series. In this blog, I will
highlight the Helix Nebula.
The Helix Nebula is located 650 light-years away from Earth in the Aquarius Constellation. Similar to the Dumbbell Nebula in my previous blog, this Nebula is also a planetary Nebula and is cataloged as NGC 7293.
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| Credits: NASA |
This Nebula resulted in an old Sun-like star that shed its outer layers
in a supernova explosion. The same may happen to our Sun in 5 billion years too.
The structure of this Nebula resembles the
eye of Sauron from the Lord of the Rings which many of you may have noticed
too. The bright purple circle in the center of the Nebula is the ultraviolet
and infrared glow of the disk of dust that orbits the white dwarf that is
present at the very center of the Nebula.
Before the star exploded into a Supernova,
its comets and maybe planets would have orbited the star in a normal way but
when the star ran out of Hydrogen and Helium to burn for Thermo-Nuclear fusion,
it blew its outer layers off and the celestial bodies that orbited the star would
have been tossed away and into each other. The inner planets of the star system
would have probably either burned up due to the heat oof would have been
swallowed completely by the expanding star.
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