Giant Telescope Captures Ghostly Glow Of Planetary Nebula IC 1295

The most detailed picture ever captured of a ghostly dying star in our quarter of the galaxy has now been published by European astronomers, on which the nebula 3,300 light-years from Earth can be seen with its ghostly green light show.

The image, taken by the Very Large Telescope of the European Southern Observatory's facility in Chile, shows a glowing green cloud of gas called a planetary nebula, a part of the end of the life cycle of all stars the size of the sun or larger, the astronomers said.

"What you're looking at is an old star that has blown off some of its atmosphere into space, and is now surrounded by a big bubble of glowing gas," ESO spokesman Richard Hook told RIA Novosti. "The sun will do this in a few billion years," he said.

Ultraviolet radiation from the star causes the cloud to glow different colors depending on what type of gas it’s made of. Ionized oxygen gives the gas bubble seen in the image its green color, while the blue-white glow next to the green cloud is the "very hot center of the star, which will slowly cool down and die," Hook explained.

A planetary nebula forms when a star about the size of the sun is dying. Its atmosphere blows out into space because of unstable fusion reactions deep inside the star, creating a giant glowing cloud of ionized gas.

After the gas cloud glows for tens of thousands of years, it will be gone, and only that faint white remnant of the star will be left. This remnant, known as a white dwarf, will spend billions of years cooling down.

The dying star was first observed in the late 19th century, with ESO releasing the new image because "it's an interesting and unusually good picture of an object that hasn't been studied much," Hook said.