File:Fine_Ring_Nebula.jpg
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Original file (1,702 × 1,702 pixels, file size: 897 KB, MIME type: image/jpeg)
This is a file from the Wikimedia Commons. Information from its description page there is shown below. Commons is a freely licensed media file repository. You can help. |
Summary
DescriptionFine Ring Nebula.jpg |
English: The hazy and aptly named Fine Ring Nebula, shown here, is an unusual planetary nebula. Planetary nebulae form when some dying stars, having expanded into a red giant phase, expel a shell of gas as they evolve into white dwarfs. Most planetary nebulae are either spherical or elliptical in shape, or bipolar (featuring two symmetric lobes of material).
But the Fine Ring Nebula — captured here by the ESO Faint Object Spectrograph and Camera mounted on the New Technology Telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile — looks like an almost perfect circular ring. Astronomers believe that some of these more unusually shaped planetary nebulae are formed when the progenitor star is actually a binary system. The interaction between the primary star and its orbiting companion shapes the ejected material. The stellar object at the centre of the Fine Ring Nebula is indeed thought to be a binary system, orbiting with a period of 2.9 days. Observations suggest that the binary pair is almost perfectly face-on from our vantage point, implying that the planetary nebula’s structure is aligned in the same way. We are looking down on a torus (doughnut shape) of ejected material, leading to the strikingly circular ring shape in the image. Planetary nebulae are shaped by the complex interplay of many physical processes. Not only can these celestial objects be admired for their beauty, but the study of precisely how they form their striking shapes is a fascinating topic in astronomical research. This image was made using multiple filters: light observed through B and O-III filters is shown in blue, V is shown in green, R is shown in orange, and H-alpha in red. The image is approximately 200 arcseconds across. |
Date | |
Source | http://www.eso.org/public/images/potw1131a/ |
Author | ESO |
Licensing
- You are free:
- to share – to copy, distribute and transmit the work
- to remix – to adapt the work
- Under the following conditions:
- attribution – You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
Items portrayed in this file
depicts
1 August 2011
File history
Click on a date/time to view the file as it appeared at that time.
Date/Time | Thumbnail | Dimensions | User | Comment | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
current | 12:12, 1 August 2011 | 1,702 × 1,702 (897 KB) | Jmencisom |
File usage
Global file usage
The following other wikis use this file:
- Usage on af.wikipedia.org
- Usage on ar.wikipedia.org
- Usage on br.wikipedia.org
- Usage on ca.wikipedia.org
- Usage on de.wikipedia.org
- Usage on fr.wikipedia.org
- Usage on ja.wikipedia.org
- Usage on mk.wikipedia.org
- Usage on nl.wikipedia.org
- Usage on pl.wikipedia.org
- Usage on pt.wikipedia.org
- Usage on ru.wikipedia.org
- Usage on simple.wikipedia.org
- Usage on sr.wikipedia.org
- Usage on sv.wikipedia.org
- Usage on tr.wikipedia.org
- Usage on vi.wikipedia.org
- Usage on www.wikidata.org
- Usage on zh.wikipedia.org
Metadata
This file contains additional information, probably added from the digital camera or scanner used to create or digitize it.
If the file has been modified from its original state, some details may not fully reflect the modified file.
_error | 0 |
---|