MessageToEagle.com

Monster Star Hidden In The Bubble Nebula

11 April, 2012

MessageToEagle.com - A hot, powerful 0-type star 45 times more massive and several 100,000 times more luminous than the Sun is located near the center of this impressive bubble known as "Bubble Nebula".

The stellar powerhouse is so hot that it is quickly shedding material into space.

Despite its apparently spherical shape, it seems not to have the characteristics of either a planetary nebula or a supernova remnant.

This remarkable giant "Bubble" is expanding. The Bubble Nebula (also known as NGC 7635), is a mere 10 light-years wide.

It marks the boundary between an intense wind of particles from the star and the more quiescent interior of the nebula.

The central star of the nebula is responsible for a stellar wind moving at 2,000 kilometers per second (4 million miles per hour or 7 million kilometers per hour) which propels particles off the surface of the star.

The bubble surface actually marks the leading edge of this wind's gust front, which is slowing as it plows into the denser surrounding material.

The surface of the bubble is not uniform because as the shell expands outward it encounters regions of the cold gas, which are of different density and therefore arrest the expansion by differing amounts, resulting in the rippled appearance.



Click on image to enlarge

NGC 7635: The Bubble Nebula

Blown by the wind from a massive star, this interstellar apparition has a surprisingly familiar shape. Cataloged as NGC 7635, it is also known simply as The Bubble Nebula. This colorful telescopic image includes a long exposure through a hydrogen alpha filter to reveal details of the cosmic bubble and its environment. Although it looks delicate, the 10 light-year diameter bubble offers evidence of violent processes at work. A fierce stellar wind and intense radiation from that star has blasted out the structure of glowing gas against denser material in a surrounding molecular cloud. The intriguing Bubble Nebula lies a mere 11,000 light-years away toward the boastful constellation Cassiopeia. Credit & Copyright: Kent Wood


It is this gradient of background material that the wind is encountering that places the central star off center in the bubble.

There is more material to the northeast of the nebula than to the southwest, so that the wind progresses less in that direction, offsetting the central star from the geometric center of the bubble.

At a distance of 7,100 light-years from Earth, the Bubble Nebula is located in the constellation Cassiopeia and has a diameter of 6 light-years.



Click on image to enlarge

NGC 7635: The Bubble Nebula

It's the bubble versus the cloud. NGC 7635, the Bubble Nebula, is being pushed out by the stellar wind of massive central star BD+602522. Next door, though, lives a giant molecular cloud, visible to the right. At this place in space, an irresistible force meets an immovable object in an interesting way. The cloud is able to contain the expansion of the bubble gas, but gets blasted by the hot radiation from the bubble's central star. The radiation heats up dense regions of the molecular cloud causing it to glow. The Bubble Nebula, pictured above in scientifically mapped colors to bring up contrast, is about 10 light-years across and part of a much larger complex of stars and shells. Image Credit & Copyright: Larry Van Vleet


The "clouds" are a ridge of much denser gas. The lower left portion of this ridge is the brightest because it is closest to the star.

But the star's intense ultraviolet light and its strong "wind" of material is heating and eroding this area the fastest. The region between the star and the ridge reveals several loops and arcs that have never been seen before.

Astronomers are uncertain about the origin of this "bubble-within-a-bubble." It may be due to a collision of two distinct winds of material. The star's intense wind may be colliding with material streaming off the ridge of gas, which the star's intense radiation is heating and eroding.

The bubble's surface is not smooth like a soap bubble's. Its rippled appearance is due to encounters with gases of different thickness.
The Bubble Nebula can be seen with a small telescope towards the constellation of the Queen of Aethiopia (Cassiopeia).

MessageToEagle.com via NASA

See also:
Intimate Connection Between Black Holes And New-Born Stars

Follow MessageToEagle.com for the latest news on Facebook and Twitter !

Don't Miss Our Stories! Get Our Daily Email Newsletter

Enter your email address:


Once you have confirmed your email address, you will be subscribed to the newsletter.

Recommend this article:

Astrophysicist Resolves Paradox With Radio Millisecond Pulsars

Doesn't Secret Dark Matter Exist?

Black Gaps In The Sky Puzzle Astronomers

Does Elusive Higgs Boson "God Particle" Really Exist?

Mysterious Dark Matter

Mysterious Flares Emitting From Sagittarius A

Subscribe To Our Space, Astronomy, Astrophysics, Earth and Xenology News!

Grab the latest RSS feeds right to your reader, desktop or mobile phone.

Subscribe to RSS headline updates from:
Powered by FeedBurner

Go to - MAIN PAGE

Copyright @ MessageToEagle.com All rights reserved.
Go to - MAIN PAGE

 Subscribe in a reader

Join Us On Facebook!

Other Popular Articles

Monster Star Thousand Times Bigger Than Our Sun Could Soon Explode
Located at a distance of about 13 000 light-years from Earth, in the heart of the Milky Way in the constellation of Scorpius, a yellow hypergiant with a diameter about a thousand times bigger than our Sun could soon face its final days and die. Despite its enormous size, the star has not been identified as yellow hypergiant until recently.


Mysterious X-Rays From Jupiter Near The Poles
Although there had been prior detections of X-rays from Jupiter with other X-ray telescopes, no one expected that the sources of the X-rays would be located so near the poles. The X-rays are thought to be produced by energetic oxygen and sulfur ions that are trapped in Jupiter's magnetic field and crash into its atmosphere.


"Ghost Object" Appears After Black Hole Eruption
A cosmic "ghost" lurking around a distant supermassive black hole provides astronomers with valuable information about the early Universe. "We'd seen this fuzzy object a few years ago, but didn't realize until now that we were seeing a ghost", said Andy Fabian of the Cambridge University in the United Kingdom.

Mercury Surprises Scientists
On March 17, MESSENGER (MErcury Surface, Space Environment, GEochemistry, and Ranging) completed its one-year primary mission, orbiting Mercury, capturing nearly 100,000 images, and recording data that reveals new information about the planet's core, topography, and the mysterious radar bright material in the permanently shadowed areas near the poles.

Living Earth Simulator - Supercomputer Predicting The Future
In Douglas Adams book the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy we encounter a machine called Deep Thought. It is the most powerful computer ever built. Deep Thought is capable of answering questions concerning life, the Universe, and simply everything. Now scientists are planning to create a similar machine. It is called the Living Earth Simulator (LES).


Cosmic Robbers: Black Hole Jets May Cause Galaxy NGC 3801 To Die And Lose Its Stars
Armchair explorers of the cosmos can now have at their fingertips the nearly 2,000 distant planetary systems discovered by NASA's Kepler Mission. Now available for free from the iTunes App Store, Kepler Explorer was developed through the OpenLab initiative at UC Santa Cruz, which brought together faculty and students in astrophysics, art, and technology for a summer institute last year.


New Kepler Explorer: View The 1,790 Distant Planetary Systems - For Free!
Armchair explorers of the cosmos can now have at their fingertips the nearly 2,000 distant planetary systems discovered by NASA's Kepler Mission. Now available for free from the iTunes App Store, Kepler Explorer was developed through the OpenLab initiative at UC Santa Cruz, which brought together faculty and students in astrophysics, art, and technology for a summer institute last year.

Warp-Speed Planets Are Some Of The Fastest Objects In The Milky Way
Warped planets are some of the fastest objects in the Milky Way and they zoom through space near the speed of light. Some years ago astronomers were astonished when they they found the first runaway star flying out of our Galaxy at a speed of 1.5 million miles per hour. The discovery intrigued theorists, who wondered: If a star can get tossed outward at such an extreme velocity, could the same thing happen to planets?

Proof Of How The Universe Is Changing

Though the universe is filled with billions upon billions of stars, the discovery of a single variable star in 1923 altered the course of modern astronomy. And, at least one famous astronomer of the time lamented that the discovery had shattered his world view.

Bright Star In The Constellation Lyra Is Cooler Than The Human Body
The coldest class of stars have temperatures as cool as the human body. Astronomers hunted these dark orbs, termed Y dwarfs, for more than a decade without success. When viewed with a visible-light telescope, they are nearly impossible to see.

Thermonuclear Burning In A Neutron Star Detected For The First Time!
It's a very important discovery! For the first time, an international team of scientists have detected all phases of thermonuclear burning in a neutron star, located close to the center of the galaxy in the globular cluster Terzan 5.

W3Counter