Say hello to the Eskimo Nebula 👋
This nebula began forming about 10,000 years ago when a dying star started flinging material into space. When Sun-like stars exhaust their nuclear fuel, they become unstable and blast their outer layers of gas away into space (bad news for any planets in the area). This Hubble Space Telescope image shows a snapshot of the unworldly process.
Streams of high-energy ultraviolet radiation cause the expelled material to glow, creating a beautiful planetary nebula — a term chosen for the similarity in appearance to the round disk of a planet when viewed through a small telescope.
The Eskimo Nebula got its nickname because it resembles a face surrounded by a fur parka. The “parka” is a disk of material embellished by a ring of comet-shaped objects with their tails streaming away from the central, dying star. In the middle of the nebula is a bubble of material that is being blown outward by the star’s intense “wind” of high-speed material.
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