Posted on 03/08/2016 8:27:17 AM PST by Red Badger
Credit: NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA). Acknowledgment: R. Sahai and J. Trauger (Jet Propulsion Laboratory)
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This is a final act of celestial beauty before the long fade into cosmic history. Invisibly buried in the centre of this colourful swirl of gas is a dying star, roughly the same mass as the sun.
As a star ages, the nuclear reactions that keep it shining begin to falter. This uncertain energy generation causes the stars to pulsate in an irregular way, casting off its outer layers into space.
As the star sheds these outer gases, the super-hot core is revealed. It gives off huge quantities of ultraviolet light, and this radiation causes the gas shells to glow, creating the fragile beauty of the nebula.
This example is known as Kohoutek 4-55. Named after its discoverer, the Czech astronomer Luboš Kohoutec, it is located 4600 light years from Earth, in the direction of the constellation Cygnus.
This image was the final 'pretty picture' taken by the Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2). The camera was installed in 1993 and worked until 2009, offering a 16-year stretch of unparalleled observations.
WFPC2 took many of Hubble's iconic images. They helped to make the space telescope a household name across the world.
This particular shot is a composite of three images, each taken at a specific wavelength to isolate the light coming from particular atoms of gas. The different wavelengths have been colour-coded to aid recognition.
Red signifies nitrogen gas, green shows hydrogen and blue represents oxygen. The whole sequence was captured in 2 hours on 4 May 2009.
The intricate swirls of gas offer us a glimpse of our sun's distant future. In 5 billion years' time, our star will be dying. It is expected to behave in the same way as see here, shedding its outer layers to reveal the burning core, which then becomes a slowly cooling ember known as a white dwarf.
By that time, Earth will be long gone, burnt to a crisp as the sun dies. But the beauty of our star's passing will shine across the Universe.
PinGGG!.................
“In 5 billion years’ time, our star will be dying...By that time, Earth will be long gone, burnt to a crisp”
Hey, they can’t do that. It screws up all my plans!
And it won’t make a bit of difference whether you drove an SUV or a Prius, now will it?......................
NASA is all CGI all the time.
Long as it’s good the next 30 yrs....I’ll be 98!!!!
I figure I have 25 good years left, before my mind or my body go. What the sun will do in a billion years or more is of no concern to me whatsoever.
Nor your kids ,grandkids and in my case Great grandkids!!!
Actually, we had better HOPE they are right. We actually know relatively little about how stars work.
We don’t know if the Sun will stay stable 5 billion years or 5 more seconds.
We can take good guesses, compare to other similar stars, and hope, but, if we don’t start moving life off this rock and find some new rocks to live on, the show is over.
Sounds negative, yes, but, stars don’t always play by the rules, and we are totally dependent on the one we have.
Read about this star: Delta Scorpius
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_Scorpii
It was thought to be a nice stable star until 2000.
“burnt to a crisp”
Now THAT’s global warming!
Sadly, no. /s
And all this could be avoided if only we banned coal fired electricity plants and enacted cap and trade . . .
Without artificial gravity of some type and a propulsion system that reaches speeds in the 100,000 mi/sec range, we are going nowhere. Currently artificial gravity is sci fi and top velocity is 10 mi/sec. But with billions of years, we have time. lol
Then we are doomed.
(Actually, I feel that as soon as someone figures out how to make money off of space travel, the exodus will begin and, even if we have to use generation ships, we’ll get off Earth)
Will the Earth eventually experience “White Flight”?
In 5 billion years, either humans will no longer be here, or we will be able to move the Earth somewhere else.
Every honky for himself!
“to move the Earth somewhere else.”
Kinda like cheating at pinball and getting it right the first time.
Artificial gravity isn’t sci-fi, it’s an ancient principle. Tie a bucket onto a rope and swing it around your head. Centripetal force isn’t new. Just have to make the rotating piece big enough in diameter to keep the angular velocity down and keep people from getting motion sickness.
Thanks Red Badger.
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