A Dazzling Image of a Dying Star, Featuring the Great Recycling System of the Cosmos
SMRTR summary
A telescope still under construction, being tested on a routine calibration exercise, accidentally stumbled onto something extraordinary.
The MOTHRA telescope in Chile's Rio Hurtado Valley was pointing at the Helix Nebula, a dying star about 650 light-years away, simply as a training run. What it captured instead were stunning bow shocks, curved waves of stellar debris shooting outward like waves off a boat's bow, something astronomers had never seen so clearly before.
"We thought we were taking a calibration image of one of the best-known nebulae in the sky," astronomer Roberto Abraham from the University of Toronto said. "Instead, we found this extraordinary network of bow-shaped structures."
The debris fragments gradually erode as they travel, fully dissolving into the universe within about 10,000 years.
Physics professor Pieter van Dokkum of Yale notes the stakes feel personal: "Far in the future, the sun will go through a similar process, and its material will enter the same cycle."
SMRTR provides this summary for quick context. The original article belongs to Nautilus.
Read the original article