The Hourglass Nebula (MyCn18) in Musca | Hubble

The Hourglass Nebula (MyCn18) in Musca | Hubble

Do you see the hourglass shape—or does it see you?

These are images of MyCn18, a young planetary nebula located in the Milky Way Galaxy. It is about 8,000 light-years away. The image was taken with the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) aboard the Hubble Space Telescope (HST).

The true shape of MyCn18 is an hourglass with an intricate pattern of 'etchings' in its walls. This picture has been composed from three separate images taken in the light of ionized nitrogen (represented by red), hydrogen (green), and doubly-ionized oxygen (blue). With its nuclear fuel exhausted, this brief, spectacular, closing phase of a Sun-like star's life occurs as its outer layers are ejected—its core becoming a cooling, fading white dwarf.

The results are of great interest because they shed new light on the poorly understood ejection of stellar matter which accompanies the slow death of Sun-like stars. In previous ground-based images, MyCn18 appears to be a pair of large outer rings with a smaller central one, but the fine details cannot be seen.

Image 1 Credit: Raghvendra Sahai and John Trauger (JPL), the WFPC2 science team, and NASA/ESA

Image 2 Credit: NASA, ESA, Hubble, HLA; Processing & Copyright: Harshwardhan Pathak

Pathak's Instagram Page: https://www.instagram.com/mr.cosmic.wanderer/

Image 1 Release Date: Jan. 16, 1996

Image 2 Release Date: Oct. 3, 2023

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