The Stingray Nebula is the nebula of the least known planets. For half a century, astronomers have seen its formation, and now they feel something strange: it is disappearing.
“This is very, very dramatic and very strange,” said Martin A. of the Instituto de str Stroff í Sica de Andalusia in Granada, Spain, one of the co-authors of the new study on the Stingray Nebula. Guerrero said. “What we are witnessing is the evolution of nebulae in real-time. Over the years, we have seen diversity in the nebula. We have not seen before with clarity from this point of view. ”
Between 1996 and 2016, Stingray Nehula’s successive Hubble images revealed that she was becoming weaker, fuzzy, and less prominent. It is a shadow of his former self, and is fading with the day. For example, the brightness reduced by an unprecedented factor of 1,000 in an electric year due to the presence of ionized oxygen oxygen in the twenty years between observations.
What’s going on?
Astronomer Carl Gordon Heinz, S.O.O. Stingray, known as 244567, was the first person to classify the nebula’s central star as a bright blue giant. Only four years later, astronomers realized that the late-phase star was surrounded by a revolving nebula, which they quickly identified as the beginning of a planetary nebula. The hen in Stingray has the official designation of -1–13577, and is a kind of nebula formed by a star as it approaches the end of its life and begins to erode its outer layers into the surrounding system.
In early 1971, SAO 244567 began a skyrocketing temperature, with temperatures ranging from 40,000 to 108,000 degrees Fahrenheit from the turn of the millennium. And then cooling down and slowing down the process, of course.
As the intensity from the central star decreased, the amount of radiation hitting the nebula decreased. Like dimming the lights in your room for more ambiguity, the Stingray Nebula slowly closes.
Astronomers suspect that the sudden spike in temperature was caused by a helium flash, a serious condition inside a giant star where the shell of obscure helium splits into small pieces like a day, releasing an excessive amount of paint-up energy. But because the stars are so large, changes in the surface can take years.
But now that the star is returning to normal, Stingray’s brilliance is waning. Probably this happens all the time in the whole universe, but this time the astronomers were lucky enough to catch the process in action.
