APOD: NGC 7293: The Helix Nebula (2021 Oct 14)

[APOD Robot]

NGC 7293: The Helix Nebula

Explanation: A mere seven hundred light years from Earth, toward the constellation Aquarius, a sun-like star is dying. Its last few thousand years have produced the Helix Nebula (NGC 7293), a well studied and nearby example of a Planetary Nebula, typical of this final phase of stellar evolution. A total of 90 hours of exposure time have gone in to creating this expansive view of the nebula. Combining narrow band image data from emission lines of hydrogen atoms in red and oxygen atoms in blue-green hues, it shows remarkable details of the Helix's brighter inner region about 3 light-years across. The white dot at the Helix's center is this Planetary Nebula's hot, central star. A simple looking nebula at first glance, the Helix is now understood to have a surprisingly complex geometry.

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[orin stepanek]

reminda me of an eye!

I like this photo better; probably because of the color!

[neufer]

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

A New Twist[ler] on an Old Nebula
December 16, 2004 10:00AM (EST)

<<A team of astronomers, led by C. Robert O'Dell of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., made its finding using highly detailed images from the Hubble telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys, pictures from Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, and measurements from ground-based optical and radio telescopes which show the speed and direction of the outflows of material from the dying star. The results are published in the November issue of the Astronomical Journal.

"Our new observations show that the previous model of the Helix was much too simple," O'Dell said. "About a year ago, we believed the Helix was a bagel shape, filled in the middle. Now we see that this filled bagel is just the inside of the object. A much larger disk, resembling a wide, flat ring, surrounds the filled bagel. This disk is oriented almost perpendicular to the bagel. The larger disk is brighter on one side because it is slamming into interstellar material as the entire nebula moves through space, like a boat plowing through water. The encounter compresses gas, making that region glow brighter. But we still don't understand how you get such a shape. If we could explain how this shape was created, then we could explain the late stages of the most common form of collapsing stars.">>

[VictorBorun]

I am confused. Anywhere I look I can not find a clear 3d description of all that meets our telescopic eye in the Eye in a Socket which is The Helix Nebula.

Wiki pictures by words a large planar disk thing with its axis at 30° to our line of sight containing a central dense low-speed disk, a thorus around it and still larger ring of high-speed matter. Plus a barrel of carbon monoxide of the same axis that the low-speed disk has.
Cometary things forming the Helix seem all lie close to the plane.
But there is a gas disk perpendicular to the main plane too.
And one edge of the outer ring is hot, shining and flattened by ram wind of the interstellar media.

Too much for me to go by text only.

[ilikespace80085]

GAD ZOOKS!! this is a crazy lookin nebula. It's cool how dark it is around it. I kinda want to see what swimming in the rad filled space is like.

[gwagwa]

this is a cool nebula stuff like this puts a smile on my ol' face

[neufer]

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

I am confused. Anywhere I look I can not find a clear 3d description of all that meets our telescopic eye in the Eye in a Socket which is The Helix Nebula.

Wiki pictures by words a large planar disk thing with its axis at 30° to our line of sight containing a central dense low-speed disk, a thorus around it and still larger ring of high-speed matter. Plus a barrel of carbon monoxide of the same axis that the low-speed disk has.
Cometary things forming the Helix seem all lie close to the plane.
But there is a gas disk perpendicular to the main plane too.
And one edge of the outer ring is hot, shining and flattened by ram wind of the interstellar media.

Too much for me to go by text only.

[blucat]

Great rhetoric! Read the description as if you were reading it aloud for
an audio book. Whoever does these should write a sci-fi novel!

[VictorBorun]

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

I am confused. Anywhere I look I can not find a clear 3d description of all that meets our telescopic eye in the Eye in a Socket which is The Helix Nebula.

Wiki pictures by words a large planar disk thing with its axis at 30° to our line of sight containing a central dense low-speed disk, a thorus around it and still larger ring of high-speed matter. Plus a barrel of carbon monoxide of the same axis that the low-speed disk has.
Cometary things forming the Helix seem all lie close to the plane.
But there is a gas disk perpendicular to the main plane too.
And one edge of the outer ring is hot, shining and flattened by ram wind of the interstellar media.

Too much for me to go by text only.

ok, thanks. So The Helix visual coils of cometaries are not almost in one plane with 30° between the axis and our line of sight; they are rather two rings of cometaries with their planes crossing at 60° and accidentally fit to the same visual ellipsis because our line of sight happens to be the bisector of those two coils' axes.