This dramatic NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope Hubble Heritage image, showing 10 times more detail, reveals the "ant's" body as a pair of fiery lobes protruding from a dying Sun-like star.

The Hubble images directly challenge old ideas about the last stages in the lives of stars. By observing Sun-like stars as they approach their deaths, astronomers can see that our Sun's fate probably will be more interesting, complex and striking than astronomers imagined just a few years ago.

Though approaching the violence of an explosion, the ejection of gas from the dying star at the center of Mz3 has intriguing symmetrical patterns unlike the chaotic patterns expected from any ordinary explosion. Scientists using Hubble would like to understand how a spherical star can produce such prominent non-spherical symmetries in the gas that it ejects.

One possibility is that the central star of Mz3 has a closely orbiting companion that exerts strong gravitational tidal forces that shape the outflowing gas. For this to work, the orbiting companion star would have to be close to the dying star, about the distance of the Earth from the Sun.

A second possibility is that, as the dying star spins, its strong magnetic fields are wound up into complex shapes like spaghetti in an eggbeater. Charged winds moving at speeds up to 1000 kilometers per second from the star, much like those in our sun's solar wind but millions of times denser, are able to follow the twisted field lines on their way out into space. These dense winds can be rendered visible by ultraviolet light from the hot central star or from highly supersonic collisions with the ambient gas that excites the material into fluorescence.

At that distance, the orbiting companion star wouldn't be far outside the hugely bloated hulk of the dying star. It's even possible that the dying star has consumed its companion, which now orbits inside of it, much like the duck in the wolf's belly in "Peter and the Wolf."

No other planetary nebula observed by Hubble resembles Mz3 very closely. M2-9 comes close, but the outflow speeds in Mz3 are up to 10 times larger than those of M2-9 Interestingly, the very massive young star, Eta Carinae, shows a quite similar outflow pattern.

Astronomers Bruce Balick (University of Washington) and Vincent Icke (Leiden University) used Hubble to observe this planetary nebula, Mz3, in July 1997 with the Wide Field Planetary camera 2.

One year later, astronomers Raghvendra Sahai and John Trauger of the Jet Propulsion Lab in California snapped pictures of Mz3 using slightly different filters. This intriguing image, which is a composite of several filters from each of the two datasets, was created by the Hubble Heritage Team.

Image credit: NASA, ESA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

Acknowledgment: R. Sahai (Jet Propulsion Lab), B. Balick (University of Washington)

Electronic image files are available on the Internet at this URL and this one and via links in this page, this one, this one and this one.

[Contact: Dr. Raghvendra Sahai, Dr. Bruce Balick, Dr. Howard Bond, Dr. Vincent Icke]

Related websites:

http://www.strw.leidenuniv.nl/~icke/html/VincentPN.html

01-Feb-2001