An international group of astronomers using the Very Large Telescope has captured a detailed image of the reflection nebula IC 2220, also known as the Toby Jug Nebula.
This image shows the Toby Jug Nebula. Image credit: ESO.
The Toby Jug Nebula is located in the constellation of Carina 1,200 light-years away. It is a cloud of gas and dust surrounding the red giant star HD 65750.
The star has five times the mass of our Sun but it is in a much more advanced stage of its life, despite its comparatively young age of around 50 million years.
The nebula was created by the star, which is losing part of its mass out into the surrounding space, forming a cloud of gas and dust as the material cools. The dust consists of elements such as carbon and simple, heat-resistant compounds such as titanium dioxide and calcium oxide.
The Toby Jug Nebula is visible as the star’s light is reflected off the grains of dust. This celestial butterfly structure is almost symmetrical, and spans about one light-year. This phase of a star’s life is short-lived and such objects are thus rare.
Red giants are formed from stars that are ageing and approaching the final stages of their evolution. They have almost depleted their reserves of hydrogen, which fuels the reactions that occur during most of the life of a star. This causes the atmosphere of the star to expand enormously.
Stars like HD 65750 burn a shell of helium outside a carbon-oxygen core, sometimes accompanied by a hydrogen shell closer to the star’s surface.
Billions of years in the future, our Sun will also bloat into a red giant. It is expected that the solar atmosphere will inflate well beyond the current orbit of Earth, engulfing all the inner planets in the process. By then, Earth will be already in very bad shape. The huge increase of radiation and the strong stellar winds that will accompany the process of stellar inflation will destroy all life on Earth and evaporate the water in the oceans, before the entire planet is finally melted.
