NASA Celebrates 34th Anniversary of Hubble Space Telescope with Stunning Little Dumbbell Nebula Photo

SPIRIT – To commemorate the 34th anniversary of the launch of NASA’s legendary Hubble Space Telescope on April 24, astronomers captured a photo of the Little Dumbbell Nebula. The Little Dumbbell Nebula also known as Messier 76, M76, or NGC 650/651 is located 3,400 light years away in the northern circumpolar constellation Perseus.

This magnificent nebula is popular with amateur astronomers. The Little Dumbbell Nebula or M76 is classified as a planetary nebula, an expanding envelope of glowing gases ejected from a dying red giant star.

The star will then collapse into a very dense and hot white dwarf. Although it is called a planetary nebula, this object is not associated with a planet. The term comes from astronomers in the 18th century who thought that this type of object was like a planet.

The Little Dumbbell Nebula or M76 consists of a ring that appears as a rod-like structure in the middle, as well as two lobes on either side of the opening of the ring. Before the star goes out, it produces a ring of gas and dust.

The ring was likely formed by the impact of a former binary star.

The detached companion star forms a thick disk of dust and gas in the plane of the companion’s orbit. The hypothetical companion star is not visible in the Hubble image, so it appears that the central star swallowed its companion star. The disc will be a witness to the cannibalism event of the star.

The main star is collapsing to form a white dwarf. It is the hottest known stellar remnant, with temperatures reaching 250,000 degrees Fahrenheit, 24 times the surface temperature of our Sun.

This fiery white dwarf is visible as a dot in the center of the nebula. The stars shown below are not visible as part of the nebula.

In addition to the disk, two lobes of hot gas escape from the top and bottom of the “belt” on the axis of rotation of the star which is perpendicular to the disk. They are driven by hurricane-like streams of material from dying stars, tearing through space at two million miles an hour.

That speed is fast enough to travel from Earth to the Moon in just over seven minutes! This heavy “solar” wind stops cooler and slower gas that was ejected at an earlier stage in the star’s life when it was a red giant.

Strong ultraviolet radiation from the super-hot star causes the gases to glow. The red color comes from nitrogen, and the blue comes from oxygen.

Since our solar system is 4.6 billion years old, this entire nebula is just a flash in cosmological time. This nebula will disappear in about 15,000 years.

Since its launch in 1990, Hubble has made 1.6 million observations of more than 53,000 astronomical objects. To date, the Mikulski Archive for the Space Telescope at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, holds 184 terabytes of processed data ready for use by astronomers around the world for research and analysis.

Since 1990, 44,000 scientific papers have been published on Hubble observations. The space telescope is the most scientifically productive space astronomy mission in NASA history.