Overview
- NASA and ESA released a newly processed Hubble portrait that merges recent observations with 2012 WFC3 data to deliver the clearest image of the pre-planetary Egg Nebula.
- The central star is hidden by a dense dust disk, with narrow beams escaping through a polar eye to light fast polar lobes and a series of concentric arcs.
- Astronomers date the dusty disk to an ejection only a few hundred years ago, and note the nebula currently shines by reflected starlight rather than ionized gas emission.
- The Egg Nebula—about 1,000 light-years away in Cygnus—is the first, youngest, and closest known object in this brief pre-planetary phase lasting only a few thousand years.
- Hubble researchers report that the highly ordered rings and lobes likely arise from coordinated, poorly understood sputtering events and possibly from unseen companion stars, hypotheses they aim to test with multi-epoch comparisons.