The Stingray Nebula has shrunk so quickly in recent years that it could have disappeared completely in the “blink of an eye” of a few decades.
It was the beautiful bright blue colors and wavy silhouette that earned the Pintail Scroll Nebula its name in 1996. But that’s not what the planetary nebula, 18,000 light-years from Earth, looks like today – an astronomically tiny 24 years later. Snapshots taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2016 show how rapidly the nebula has decreased in size and brightness. If this bizarre ‘behavior’ continues, researchers write in the journal Astrophysical Journal, the nebula may have disappeared from the night sky in 20 to 30 years.
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Frozen in time
A planetary nebula is formed when a star, roughly the size of our sun, reaches one of the final stages of its life. Burning out its last bits of nuclear energy, such a star swells into a red giant. “Such a red giant easily loses material, and the outer layers are thrown back into space,” astronomer Silvia Toonen (University of Amsterdam) explained earlier to KIJK. “What remains is the star’s old, super-dense, burnt-out core; a white dwarf. ”
This evolution from red giant, to planetary nebula to white dwarf, usually takes millions to sometimes billions of years. Planetary nebulae hardly seem to change for us. Appear, because even though we do not see the developments immediately, they do take place – very slowly -.
20 years
The Stingray Nebula (Hen 3-1357), by far the youngest nebula in our starry sky, appears to be an exception to this rule. It appeared in the 1980s and was first recorded by astronomers in the 1990s with NASA’s Hubble. When researchers recently examined newer shots of the nebula, they saw that it has changed significantly in just 20 years. Incredibly fast, the researchers write.
In 20 years, less than a blink of an eye on the astronomical time scale, the Stingray Nebula lost its typical blue color and wavy silhouette. Analyzes of the nebula’s light spectrum, caused by its chemical composition, show that the concentrations of hydrogen, nitrogen, sulfur and oxygen decreased drastically between 1996 and 2016. Oxygen in particular disappeared very quickly: by a factor of 900.
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Kernster
The big why? The researchers haven’t figured this out yet. The nebula’s rapid ‘fading out’ may be related to the white dwarf star at the core. SAO 245567 turns out to be quite fickle. For example, the white dwarf reached a temperature of almost 60,000 degrees Celsius in 2002, but was less than 50,000 degrees in 2015.
How the nebula will develop in the coming years is difficult to predict. But, the team writes, if it continues like this, chances are that the once beautiful blue stingray nebula will disappear as suddenly as it appeared. Enjoy while you can!
Sources: Astrophysical Journal (arXiv.org), EurekAlert!, New Atlas
Beeld: NASA / ESA / Bruce Balick / Martín Guerrero / Gerardo Ramos-Larios
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