The European Southern Observatory (ESO) today unveiled the most detailed image so far taken Nebula Medusa, in which the stars in their hearts already started “transition to retirement” shedding their outer layers into space forming a colorful cloud.
The new image was taken by a team of astronomers using the large telescope (VLT) in Chile located within the “Cosmic Jewels” ESO program.
According to the Observatory said in a statement, image predicts the fate of the sun, which eventually also become an object of this type before ending his active life as a “white dwarf”.
Also known as Sharpless 2-274, Medusa has an area of about four light years, it lies in the constellation Gemini (the twins) to 1,500 light years from Earth and, despite its size it is extremely faint and difficult to observe.
The serpentine filaments of gas, with the red glow of hydrogen and green, this nebula oxygen-baptize with the name of the “Gorgon Medusa”, a creature from Greek mythology who had snakes instead of hair.
For tens of thousands of years, the stellar nuclei of planetary nebulae “remain surrounded by spectacularly colorful clouds of gas”; few thousand years later, the gas is dispersed intermittently in their environment, leading to structures like Medusa.
The stage as a planetary nebula is only a small fraction of the total lifetime of a star, says the Observatory.
Compared to a human life, he adds, it would be a brief “comparable to the time it takes a child to make a soap bubble and watch it drift away” instantly.
The “Cosmic Jewels” ESO program -in which included the ultimate representation of the Medusa- nebula is an initiative that makes use of a telescope time can not be used for scientific observations and plays images of interesting, intriguing or visually attractive objects with an educational and informative purpose.
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