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Picture of the day - October 8, 2005
The Beautiful Cat's Eye Nebula
Photo courtesy of NASA.
Planetary nebulae are some of the most beautiful and interesting objects
in the universe. When a sun-like star ages to the point where the nuclear
reactions in its core come to an end, the helium gas continues to burn. As a result,
an outer shell of gas expands around the star creating one of God's most unique
mosaics.
In a nutshell, a nebula consists of a hot, blue-white central star enveloped by a shell of expanding gas.
In 1784, William Herschel invented the term
Planetary Nebula to describe these types of objects because they sort of resembled the planet he had recently discovered -
Uranus.
As you can see in today's stunning picture of the Cat's Eye Nebula, the Hubble
Space Telescope has given us the ability to see distant objects more clearly
and "close-up" than Herschel and his contemporaries could have even
imagined.
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