Hubble telescope celebrates 34th anniversary with an iridescent Dumbbell Nebula (image)

In the 34 years this telescope has been in orbit, it has produced breathtaking images of the cosmos. One that sticks out, for instance, is the iconic, astronomers know our universe is about 13.7 billion years old and that many galaxies host supermassive black holes at their centers.

So, to celebrate 34 years of Hubble, the astronomers unveiled a fresh image the telescope took of the Dumbbell Nebula, or M76, which is a two-lobed, expanding shell of gas shed by a dying star at the center. Located 3,400 light-years from Earth in the constellation Perseus, M76 resembles"a balloon that's been pinched around a middle waist," bordered by a glowing ring of gas and dust ejected by the central star when it ran out of fuel. The star sizzles at temperatures exceeding 130,000 degrees Celsius — roughly 24 times the temperature of our sun's surface, making it one of the hottest known stellar remnants.

As seen in the Hubble image, the star's outer layers form a dumbbell-shaped ring around it, which hosts countless dense knots of gas and dust ranging from 17 billion kilometers to 56 billion kilometers and each encompassing as much mass as three whole Earths. It is possible that this ring was shaped by a binary star, although that companion star itself isn't seen in any Hubble images.

The material seen in the image is blasting out into space at a speedy two million miles per hour."That's fast enough to travel from Earth to the Moon in a little over seven minutes!" the Hubble team said in the statement.that arose because astronomers using smaller telescopes in the 1700s misinterpreted such nebulas as planets.

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