Southern Crab Nebula (He2-104)
A planetary nebula in the constellation
Centaurus. At the center of the nebula are two
stars: a white dwarf and a red
giant, each with a mass roughly equal to that of the Sun. The red giant
star turns out to be a Mira variable,
a pulsating star that is dumping material into an accretion disk surrounding
the white dwarf. It is thought that when enough mass falls onto the white
dwarf, a thermonuclear explosion occurs creating another expanding hourglass-shaped
nebula. The photograph shown here was taken with the WFPC2 instrument onboard
the Hubble Space Telescope. The hourglasses from the two most recent explosions
are visible with the last one highlighted in the inset.
Related
category
• NEBULAE
AND STAR CLUSTERS
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