'Necklace nebula': NASA shares image of dazzling diamond necklace of cosmic proportions

NASA on Tuesday unveiled a new image of the Necklace Nebula, a celestial ring that it described as “a diamond necklace of cosmic proportions.” Located 15,000 light-years away from Earth in the small, dim constellation of Sagitta or the Arrow, the nebula dubbed as PN G054.203.4 was captured on NASA’s Hubble Space telescope. Sharing the iconic imagery across its social media platform, NASA said, that the dazzling necklace nebula was formed after the interaction of two doomed stars which resulted in the creation of this spectacular ring adorned with bright clumps of gas. one of these Sun-like stars expanded and engulfed its smaller companion, forming a “common envelope,” (CE) which is a system of binary star evolution. 

“The smaller star continued to orbit inside its larger companion, increasing the bloated giant’s rotation rate until large parts of it spun outwards into space. This escaping ring of debris formed the Necklace Nebula, with particularly dense clumps of gas-forming the bright ‘diamonds’ around the ring,” said NASA in a release, explaining the phenomenon. The two-star merger that appears like a tiny dot is just several million miles across from each other furiously whirling around completing an orbit in a day. The image was taken after several exposures on the Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3. Hubble first spotted Necklace Nebula in 2011, as it picked mysterious glowing remains of an ordinary, Sun-like star. 

Why does this nebula have a 'necklace-like' ring?

The nebula’s ‘diamond-like necklace’ is in actual a bright ring that measures approximately 12 trillion miles wide, and is dotted with dense, bright knots of gas, according to NASA scientists. The reason this mystic nebula’s ring appears so is due to the intense centrifugal force which causes most of its gas to escape along the star’s equator, hence giving it a structure like a ring. Precisely, the image was taken on July 2, 2011, with Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 when it first detected the glow of hydrogen (blue), oxygen (green), and nitrogen (red). NAS said in a Twitter caption, that it was “starry-eyed” by the cosmic diamond necklace in the space. 

IMAGE: NASA