The Cork Nebula, also known as Messier 76, M76, NGC 650/651, and the Barbell Nebula, is a planetary nebula located 3,400 light-years away in the constellation Perseus. This nebula is a popular target for telescopes in the summer in the Northern Hemisphere. To commemorate its 34th anniversary on April 23, 2024, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope released an image of this celestial body.
The image comes from a new data archive at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. Despite its name, a planetary nebula is not the remains of a planet but an expanding shell of gas and dust ejected from a red giant star as it collapsed into a dense, hot white dwarf star. Hubble’s new image reveals two glowing lobes of gas and dust on both sides of a central bar.
Scientists believe that these rings were caused by another star that the central white dwarf has consumed over time. The temperature of this white dwarf is one of the hottest known among remnants of red giant stars, with temperatures reaching up to 216,000 degrees Fahrenheit (120,000 degrees Celsius). It appears as a pinprick of light in the center of the nebula. The colorful nebula is due to dust and gas particles ejected by the central star at speeds exceeding 2 million mph (3.2 million km/h) and glowing due to ultraviolet radiation from the star. Red represents nitrogen while blue shows oxygen.
The Cork Nebula will remain visible for about 15,000 more years before all its remaining gas vanishes into space forever.
