ESO Very Large Telescope Captures Butterfly-like Nebula Emerging from a Dying Star

First Posted: Jun 10, 2015 09:04 AM EDT
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Scientists have snapped some of the sharpest images to date with ESO's Very Large Telescope. Now, they've caught what appears to be an aging star giving birth to a butterfly-like planetary nebula.

In this case, the researchers examined the red star L2 Puppis from the ZIMPOL mode of the newly installed SPHERE instrument. These observations not only showed the star, but also a close stellar companion.

L2 Puppis is located about 200 light-years away and is one of the closest red giants to Earth known to be entering its final stages of life. ZIMPOL helped produce images that were three times sharper than those from the Hubble Space Telescope. They reveal the dust that surrounds the L2 Puppis and confirm that the dust is arranged in a disc. When seen from Earth, it's almost seen completely edge-on.

This dusty disk begins about 900 million kilometer from the star, which is slightly farther than the distance from the sun to Jupiter. It flares outward and creates a symmetrical, funnel-like shape surrounding the star. The team also found a second source of light about 300 million kilometers fro L2 Puppis.

The combination of dust along with the presence of a companion star means that this is exactly the type of system expected to create a bipolar planetary nebula.

"The origin of bipolar planetary nebulae is one of the great classic problems of modern astrophysics, especially the question of how, exactly, stars return their valuable payload of metals back into space-an important process, because it is this material that will be used to produce later generations of planetary systems," said Pierre Kervella, the lead author of the new paper, in a news release.

There is still much to be understood. However, these new images may tell scientists a bit more about bipolar planetary nebulae.

The findings are published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

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