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Butterfly Emerges from Stellar Demise Tuesday, September 29, 2009 - Anuradha Menon Home >> Picture Of The Day >> Space   
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| This celestial object looks like a delicate butterfly. But it is far from serene. What resemble dainty butterfly wings are actually roiling cauldrons of gas heated to more than 36,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The gas is tearing across space at more than 600,000 miles an hour—fast enough to travel from Earth to the Moon in 24 minutes! | ||||||||||
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A dying star that was once about five times the mass of the Sun is at the center of this fury. It has ejected its envelope of gases and is now unleashing a stream of ultraviolet radiation that is making the cast-off material glow. This object is an example of a planetary nebula, so-named because many of them have a round appearance resembling that of a planet when viewed through a small telescope. The Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), a new camera aboard NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, snapped this image of the planetary nebula, cataloged as NGC 6302, but more popularly called the Bug Nebula or the Butterfly Nebula. WFC3 was installed by NASA astronauts in May 2009, during the servicing mission to upgrade and repair the 19-year-old Hubble telescope. (Image Credit: NASA) |
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Considering your name \"The Future of Things\", you surely live way-way in the past - with the use of fahrenheit and miles an hour. ONLY United States, Myanmar (Burma) and Liberia depend on old systems of measurements. Even within these countries, the metric system is often used, especially in scientific and international contexts. Could TFOT please start using Celsius and km/h (perhaps you can show the way-back units in parenthesis). Thanks. It\'s about time, as you can see: http://lamar.colostate.edu/~hillger/internat.htm#chart |
