Here's How Hubble Captured The Demise Of A Sun-Like Star In A Distant Constellation

An image taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has captured the last few moments before a star's death.?

The star is captured breathing its last while casting off its outer layers of gas, which formed a cocoon around the star's remaining core. Ultraviolet light from the dying star makes the material glow. The burned-out star, called a white dwarf, is the white dot in the center.?

Our sun will eventually burn out and shroud itself with stellar debris, but not for another 5 billion years.

Wikimedia

Our Milky Way Galaxy is littered with these stellar relics, called planetary nebulae. The objects have nothing to do with planets. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century astronomers called them the name because through small telescopes they resembled the disks of the distant planets Uranus and Neptune.?

The image of the dying star is one of the most picturesque events in space. As the star begins to degenerate, the star expelled material in a different direction. This can be seen in the two bowtie-shaped lobes.

The nebula is also rich in clouds of dust, some of which form long, dark streaks pointing away from the star.?

NASA

The material expelled by the star glows with different colors depending on its composition, its density and how close it is to the hot central star. Blue samples helium; blue-green oxygen, and red nitrogen and hydrogen.?

The star captured by the Hubble Telescope is called NGC 2440 which lies about 4,000 light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Puppis.