August 21, 2018

HuBi 1 (Image courtesy Guerrero, Fang, Miller Bertolami, et al., 2018, Nature Astronomy, tmp, 112. All rights reserved)

An article published in the journal “Nature Astronomy” describes a research on the planetary nebula HuBi 1. Normally that kind of structure marks a phase of a star’s agony but in this case a team of researchers discovered an nebula that’s inside-out. Their conclusion is that the star at its center is going through a sort of rebirth process so we see it while it’s ejecting materials from its surface and creating a shock wave that excites the nebula’s materials.