Hubble Space Telescope has imaged a sparkling and lovely Wolf-Rayet star named WR 31a located at the center of a Wolf-Rayet nebula some 30,000 light-years away from us.
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But Wolf-Rayet stars only have a lifecycle of a few hundred thousand years.
A recently formed nebula in the cosmic sense as NASA scientists believe it to be about 20,000 years old and is expanding at about 136,700 miles an hour.
“And WR 31a is no exception to this case”, says NASA in a statement.
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope was able to capture an image of the spectacular blue bubble in space – a star called WR 31a enveloped in a bed of blue wonder.
A Wolf-Rayet nebula is an interstellar cloud of dust, hydrogen, helium and other gases which is normally created when speedy stellar winds interact with the outer layers of hydrogen ejected by Wolf-Rayet stars. It’s classified as a Wolf-Rayet star and the bubble is a Wolf-Rayet nebula. And because those stars are almost 20, 30 times bigger than our own sun, it makes the phenomenon even more impressive.
Star WR 31a was captured by Hubble in one mesmerizing image.
With its 2.4-meter (7.9 ft) mirror, near ultraviolet, visible and near infrared spectra, Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has sent back extremely high-resolution images with negligible background light. Hot, massive plasma spheres characterized by broad emission lines of helium, nitrogen, and carbon, Wolf Rayet (WR) stars produce nebulae when their intense stellar winds start to blow their particles into space. Moreover, it’s expected to live another 5 billion years.
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The blue bubble nebula surrounding the star is a attractive view for now, but WR 31a is destined to become a supernova relatively soon on the time scale of our universe.
