The Little Dumbbell Nebula, also known as Messier 76, M76, NGC 650/651, the Cork Nebula, and the Barbell Nebula, is a planetary nebula located 3,400 light-years away in the constellation Perseus. This nebula is a popular target for telescopes in the summer in the Northern Hemisphere. It was shared on April 23, 2024, to mark the 34th anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope’s launch on April 24, 1990.
The image of the Little Dumbbell Nebula comes from the newest data in an archive of 184 terabytes stored at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. Despite its name, a planetary nebula is not the remains of a planet but is an expanding shell of gas and dust ejected from a red giant star as it collapsed into a dense, hot white dwarf star. Hubble’s new image shows the Little Dumbbell Nebula as two lobes of glowing gas and dust on both sides of a central bar.
Scientists believe that the rings in the nebula were caused by a second star that the central white dwarf star has since consumed. The white dwarf in the Little Dumbbell Nebula is one of the hottest white dwarf remnants known, with a temperature of 216,000 degrees Fahrenheit (120,000 degrees Celsius). It appears as a pinprick of light in the nebula’s center. The colorful nebula is due to the dust and gas ejected by the central star at a speed of 2 million mph (3.2 million km/h) and is glowing due to ultraviolet radiation from the star, with red denoting nitrogen and blue showing oxygen.
The Little Dumbbell Nebula will remain visible for about 15,000 more years before the last of its gas vanishes into space.