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Explanation: The small constellation Sagitta sports this large piece of cosmic jewelry, dubbed the Necklace Nebula. The newly discovered example of a ring-shaped planetary nebula is about 15,000 light-years distant. Its bright ring with pearls of glowing gas is half a light-year across. Planetary nebulae are created by sun-like stars in a final phase of stellar evolution. But the Necklace Nebula's central star, near the center of a ring strongly tilted to our line of sight, has also been shown to be binary, a close system of two stars with an orbital period of just over a day. Astronomers estimating the apparent age of the ring to be around 5,000 years, also find more distant gas clouds perpendicular to the ring plane, seen here at the upper left and lower right. Those clouds were likely ejected about 5,000 years before the clouds forming the necklace. This false color image combines emission from ionized hydrogen in blue, oxygen in green, and nitrogen in red.
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NASA Official: Jay Norris. Specific rights apply.
A service of: LHEA at NASA / GSFC
& Michigan Tech. U.
Based on Astronomy Picture
Of the Day
Publications with keywords: planetary nebula - stellar evolution - binary star - narrow band filter
Publications with words: planetary nebula - stellar evolution - binary star - narrow band filter
See also:
- APOD: 2025 July 13 B Planetary Nebula Mz3: The Ant Nebula
- APOD: 2025 June 9 B Between Scylla and Charybdis: A Double Cosmic Discovery
- APOD: 2025 May 14 B NGC 1360: The Robins Egg Nebula
- APOD: 2025 April 27 B IC 418: The Spirograph Nebula
- APOD: 2025 April 15 B Planetary Nebula NGC 1514 from Webb
- Planetary Nebula Abell 7
- The Medusa Nebula