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. In April 2024, on its 34th anniversary of Hubble Space Telescope’s launch on April 24, 1990, scientists shared a stunning new image of this nebula.
The image comes from an archive of data at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore and reveals that despite its name, a planetary nebula is not the remains of a planet but an expanding shell of gas and dust ejected from a red giant star as it collapsed into a dense white dwarf star. Hubble’s new image shows two lobes of glowing gas and dust on both sides of a central bar.
Scientists believe that these rings were caused by a second star that was consumed by the central white dwarf star. The white dwarf in this nebula is one of the hottest white dwarf remnants known with temperature at around 216 thousand degrees Fahrenheit (120 thousand degrees Celsius). It appears as pinprick of light in center of nebula while its colorful appearance due to dust and gas ejected by central star moving at speed of about 2 million mph (3.2 million km/h) with red denoting nitrogen and blue showing oxygen.
The Little Dumbbell Nebula will remain visible for approximately another 15,000 years before all its gas disappears into space.
