The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has released an exciting new image that was transferred to Earth from the Hubble Space Telescope.
The image shows a planetary nebula in the constellation Cygnus, located about 5,000 light-years away. The thing has a very strange shape.
Planetary nebulae have nothing to do with planets. Such structures are formed when the outer layers of red giants and supergiants are destroyed by a solar mass of 0.8–8 at the final stage of their growth. As a result, a white dwarf is formed.
Abell 78, as the researchers believe, is unusual in that the so-called star is again involved in creation. Thermonuclear activity on the star’s surface leads to ejection of material at high speed. The result of these processes is a change in the structure of the planetary nebula.
We add that the image combines data from the Wide Field Camera 3 on board the Hubble and the Pan-STARRS ground-based telescope system (Panoramic Inspection Telescope and Rapid Response System).