Now that the seasons have changed, the scary season has officially arrived. It’s again that time of year that anyone and everyone from Spirit Halloween to NASA aims to get as scared as possible. In the case of the latter, the space agency shared a creepy photo on Saturday, showing cosmic horror in the form of a nebula.
In an Instagram post, NASA shared a snapshot of the Helix Nebula, a cosmic cloud floating in the constellation Aquarius. With the dying star at its center, the cloud gives the appearance of an all-watching eye—one terrifying enough that it would make Sauron jealous.
If you are afraid that this horror may eat you while you are sleeping, do not worry. The Helix Nebula is located 650 light years away. “When some stars run out of fuel, they expand and form a red giant and their outer layers peel off,” NASA says in an Instagram post. “After the fall of the outer layers, a hot core remains, forming a white dwarf star, known as a planetary nebula, the fate of which awaits our sun in about 5 billion years.”
In total, NASA used four different observatories to capture the full infernal picture.
“This image was created by overlapping images from four of our telescopes,” the agency added. Each telescope looks at the universe with different wavelengths of light: the visible spectrum of Tweet embed Appears in orange and blue; X-ray of Chandra in white; Infrared data from the Spitzer Space Telescope in green and red; and UV from the Galaxy Evolution Explorer in cyan. “
This isn’t the first time that NASA officials have released images of the Helix Nebula. This time last year, the outfit shared an even scarier version of Cloud.
“The two-light-year-diameter shroud of dust and gas around a central white dwarf is an example of a planetary nebula, one of the final stages in the evolution of a Sun-like star. The dust makes this cosmic eye shine red,” NASA explained in the post at the time.
She added: “The nebula was ejected from the star several thousand years ago, and nearby dust can be generated by collisions in a reservoir of objects, such as our solar system’s Kuiper belt or the cometary Oort cloud. Planetary system, comet-like objects otherwise escaped phases Late star evolution.
For more images from the Webb Space Telescope and other cosmic stories, check out the ComicBook Invasion Center here.
.
[ad_2]
