R Aquarii and the nebula surrounding the system studied with the Hubble Space Telescope
An image captured by the Hubble Space Telescope depicts R Aquarii, a binary system consisting of a red giant and a white dwarf. Four different filters of the WFC3 (Wide Field Camera 3) instrument were used in visible light to create the most recent observation of R Aquarii conducted with Hubble. This allowed to examine the changes that have occurred in particular in the nebula surrounding the pair.
The R Aquarii system is in the cosmic neighborhood, being about 650 light-years from Earth. For this reason, it has been the subject of study with different instruments since the two stars that make up the pair, which are invisible to the naked eye, were discovered. For example, it was the subject of a test using a subsystem of the SPHERE instrument installed on ESO’s VLT in Chile.