NGC 6153 is a planetary nebula that is elliptical in shape, with an extremely rich network of loops and filaments, shown clearly in this Hubble image. However, this is not what makes this planetary nebula so interesting for astronomers — it contains five times more nitrogen than our Sun as well as high concentrations of other elements. Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, Acknowledgement: Matej Novak.This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image shows a planetary nebula named NGC 6153, located about 4,000 light-years away in the southern constellation of Scorpius (The Scorpion). The faint blue haze across the frame shows what remains of a star like the Sun after it has depleted most of its fuel. When this happens, the outer layers of the star are ejected, and get excited and ionised by the energetic ultraviolet light emitted by the bright hot core of the star, forming the nebula.
NGC 6153 is a planetary nebula that is elliptical in shape, with an extremely rich network of loops and filaments, shown clearly in this Hubble image. However, this is not what makes this planetary nebula so interesting for astronomers.
Measurements show that NGC 6153 contains large amounts of neon, argon, oxygen, carbon and chlorine — up to three times more than can be found in the Solar System. The nebula contains a whopping five times more nitrogen than our Sun! Although it may be that the star developed higher levels of these elements as it grew and evolved, it is more likely that the star originally formed from a cloud of material that already contained a lot more of these elements.
An international team of scientists has detected and confirmed the faintest early-universe galaxy ever using the ten-metre Keck II telescope on the summit on Maunakea, Hawaii. The team analysed three separate images of the object gravitationally lensed by a foreground galaxy cluster, revealing the distant galaxy as it was 13 billion years ago.
The globular cluster M13 in Hercules, a splendid sight in even modest telescopes, serves up a vast metropolis of stars when imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope.
MACS J0717, some 5.4 billion light-years away from Earth in the constellation of Auriga (The Charioteer), is the result of four galaxy clusters colliding. This image is a combination of observations in visible light, X-rays and radio waves from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, and the NRAO Jansky Very Large Array.
