Why does planetary nebula glow

Eventually, though, every star will exhaust the ability to fuse nuclei into heavier elements. When that happens for a star less than about 8 times the mass of the Sun, it swells up to a huge size, large enough to engulf some of the planets orbiting it. The dying star then sheds those layers to make a planetary nebula. Our Sun may also make a planetary nebula when it runs out of nuclear fuel in about 5 billion years.

The beauty of planetary nebulas is short-lived: they only linger a few thousand or tens of thousands of years before dispersing into interstellar space. Between that and their relatively small size, we only know of about 3, planetary nebulas in our galaxy. However, the short lifespan means we can observe some planetary nebulas evolve, expand, and fade over a period of decades. That provides a detailed picture of how dying stars spread their atoms and molecules into the galaxy.

The beautiful and complicated structure of planetary nebulas also reveals something about the interior of a dying star. Four planetary nebulas imaged in visible and X-ray light. Another common type of emission nebula is a planetary nebula. These objects consist of a central white dwarf star surrounded by clouds of gas released as the original star evolved to the white dwarf phase.

In this case, the excited gas is not necessarily dominated by HII , but can also contain significant amounts of ionised helium HeII; blue emission and doubly-ionised oxygen OIII ; green emission. Since much more energy is required to ionise helium than hydrogen, the bluest areas of planetary nebulae are the hottest and indicate the areas of highest excitation.

The Orion Nebula M42 is possibly the most famous emission nebula. Massive stars located in the heart of the nebula are bombarding the gas with UV radiation causing it to glow. The nebula, created by a binary star system, The finding, using modern instruments, confirms one of the oldest observations The finding opens up a new window to search for exoplanets at greater distances Did Venus Ever Have Oceans?

Now an international This is the first time this detection method has been These rocky worlds have an ultra-thin outer brittle layer and little to no topography. Such worlds After studying the chemical composition of 'polluted' Scientists have developed a