Wednesday, September 28, 2011

The Fried Egg Nebula

That's what astronomers have tagged this example, which shows a gigantic star at the center of two expanding shells of debris as it goes through the stages of stellar death. The star, 13,000 light years away, is a rare "yellow hypergiant" 20,000 times the mass of our sun.

Watch in wonder....

COMMENT: Surely they could have come up with a cooler nickname, like the "Target Nebula" or the "Robin Hood Nebula." Of course, the image came from an instrument called the Very Large Telescope. Seriously. We need to ship an emergency supply of cool names to Europe.

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