Zombie Star: Sol, This May Be Your Future
Thursday, November 15, 2012 - 17:20
in Astronomy & Space
The planetary nebula Abell 30 is located 5,500 light-years from Earth and it has given astronomers a lookl at a dying Sun-like star that came briefly back to life after giving up the stellar ghost, mimicking the possible fate our own Solar System faces in a few billion years.. ‘Planetary nebula’ is the name given to the often-concentric shells of stellar material cast into space by dying stars. To astronomers of the 18th century, these objects looked like the colorful ‘blob’ of a planet through their telescopes, and the name stuck. Astronomers now know that as a star with less than eight times the mass of the Sun swells into a red giant towards the end of its life, its outer layers are expelled via pulsations and winds. read more