When a star dies, it can look beautiful. A good example of this is NGC 5189. In 2012, the Hubble Space Telescope imaged this complex planetary nebula with a spiral structure.
The beautiful picture is very colorful. This is due to the use of five different color filters. Of course, if you look at the nebula through a telescope, you won't see all these colors. In addition, the object looks more like a barred spiral galaxy than a nebula, due to its distinctive S-shaped structure.
The beautiful nebula is located 1,800 light-years from Earth in the constellation Taurus. The object is three light years in diameter. When it died, the star lost its outer layers of gas. This gas is illuminated by ultraviolet radiation coming from the central star. This did not happen all at once, but over a longer period of time. If you look closely at the center of the nebula, you'll see a kind of distorted torus. This structure developed after the lobes at the top and bottom. The star at the center of the nebula is now a white dwarf.
The nebula has a special dipole (or quadrupole) structure, which can be explained by the presence of a second star. When the central star lost its gaseous layers, the companion star affected the pattern of these gaseous strings. Is this theory really true? Astronomers do not dare to say for sure, because the accompanying star cannot be found in the image.
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