12/11/2020
IC 4593 • A Cosmic Amethyst in a Dying Star
12.11.2020
• Chandra has found a bubble of ultra-hot gas at the center of a planetary nebula. (Descriptive video in post comments)
• Planetary nebulas are formed when Sun-like stars run out of fuel, shedding their outer layers while the star's core shrinks.
• This image contains X-rays from Chandra (purple) and optical light data from Hubble (pink and green).
• IC 4593 is at a distance of about 7,800 light years from Earth, which is the farthest planetary nebula detected by Chandra.
On Earth, amethysts can form when gas bubbles in lava cool under the right conditions. In space, a dying star with a mass similar to the Sun is capable of producing a structure on par with the appeal of these beautiful gems.
As stars like the Sun run through their fuel, they cast off their outer layers and the core of the star shrinks. Using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, astronomers have found a bubble of ultra-hot gas at the center of one of these expiring stars, a planetary nebula in our galaxy called IC 4593. At a distance of about 7,800 light years from Earth, IC 4593 is the most distant planetary nebula yet detected with Chandra.
This new image of IC 4593 has X-rays from Chandra in purple, invoking similarities to amethysts found in geodes around the globe. The bubble detected by Chandra is from gas that has been heated to over a million degrees. These high temperatures were likely generated by material that blew away from the shrunken core of the star and crashed into gas that had previously been ejected by the star.
This composite image also contains visible light data from the Hubble Space Telescope (pink and green). The pink regions in the Hubble image are the overlap of emission from cooler gas composed of a combination of nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen, while the green emission is mainly from nitrogen.
• Continue Reading: https://chandra.si.edu/photo/2020/ic4593/
• Research PAPER: "Chandra observations of the planetary nebula IC 4593"
J.A. Toalá et al, 2020: https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.04542
• Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/UNAM/J. Toalá et al.; Optical: NASA/STScI
