Скачать или смотреть The Dragon's Egg Nebula

Here's a stunning image of the Dragon's Egg Nebula (4000 light years distant) captured by Rowan Prangley in 2023, totalling an incredible 43 hours of exposure time!

Officially called NGC 6164/6165, this nebula surrounds a central massive binary pair of stars. One of the stars has an unusually strong magnetic field and seems much younger than the other. Also, the nebula is significantly younger than either star, and made up of gases normally found deep within a star and not on the outside. For years, this situation was a conundrum.

Astronomers now think there were originally 3 stars in the system. Two of them collided and merged, creating a new, larger and magnetic star. The collision spewed the insides of the stars out into space, creating the spectacular nebula that we see.

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