A group of UAE astronomers took a photograph of a glowing cloud of gas and dust from a dying star about 1,500 light years from Earth, offering a glimpse into what may happen to the Sun billions of years from now.
The Medusa Nebula, in the constellation Gemini, was photographed by the Al Khatim Astronomical Observatory in the Abu Dhabi desert after 33 hours of imaging, state news agency Wam reported.
Nebulae like the Medusa are created when a star reaches the end of its life. As it exhausts its fuel, the star sheds its outer layers in an explosion, leaving behind a cloud of glowing gas that stretches across light years.
The Medusa Nebula, discovered in 1955, is about 1,500 light years from Earth across the Milky Way. The observatory’s detailed image shows the nebula's bright red and blue hues, the result of ionised gases released by the star’s death.
At its centre is a faint white dwarf, which is a dense core left behind after the star’s explosion. This remnant represents the Sun’s eventual fate billions of years from now, as it, too, will deplete its fuel, shed its outer layers and form a glowing nebula.
The image also captured four galaxies in the background which have been given the prefix PGC for their Principal Galaxies Catalogue numbers. These galaxies are between 736 million and 1.8 billion light years from Earth.
While the Medusa Nebula is the remnants of a dying star, other nebulae are giving birth to stars. The Orion Nebula, for example, is located about 1,344 light years from Earth and is a nursery where gravity pulls together gases and dust to form stars, demonstrating the cycle of creation and destruction.
