The Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 on the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has taken a beautiful image of a Wolf-Rayet star surrounded by a nebula of expelled material called M1-67.
This Hubble image shows the nebula M1-67 around the Wolf-Rayet star WR 124. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble / Judy Schmidt, geckzilla.com.
M1-67 is a very young ring nebula located in the constellation Sagittarius.
It lies at a distance of 15,000 light-years from Earth and is estimated to be no more than 10,000 years old – just a baby in astronomical terms.
The central star, WR 124, is of the Wolf-Rayet type. This extremely rare and short-lived class of super-hot star (in this case 50,000 degrees Kelvin) is going through a violent, transitional phase characterized by the fierce ejection of mass.
WR 124, also known as Hen 2-427, was discovered by the American astronomer Paul Merrill in 1938.
The star has a radial velocity of around 200 km/s, making it one of the fastest runaway stars in our Milky Way Galaxy.
This Hubble image shows vast arcs of glowing gas around WR 124, which are resolved into filamentary, chaotic substructures.
Though the existence of clumps in the winds of hot stars has been deduced through spectroscopic observations of their inner winds, Hubble resolves them directly in the nebula around the star as 100 billion-mile wide glowing gas blobs. Each blob is about 30 times the mass of the Earth.
As these blobs cool they will eventually dissipate into space and so don’t pose any threat to neighboring stars.
