Cat's Eye Nebula in 60 Seconds
Narrator (Megan Watzke, CXC): This composite
of data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory
and the Hubble Space Telescope is another
look for NGC 6543, better known as the Cat's
Eye nebula. This famous object is a so-called
planetary nebula that represents a phase of
stellar evolution that the Sun should experience
several billion years from now. When a star
like the Sun begins to run out of fuel, it
becomes what is known as a red giant. In this
phase, a star sheds some of its outer layers.
A fast wind streaming away from the hot core
rams into the ejected atmosphere, pushing
it outward, and creating the graceful filamentary
structures seen with optical telescopes. In
the case of the Cat's Eye, material shed by
the star is flying away at a speed of about
4 million miles per hour. The hot core left
behind will eventually collapse to form a
dense white dwarf star.
Chandra's X-ray data of the Cat's Eye, which
are seen as blue in this image, show that
its central star is surrounded by a cloud
of multi-million-degree gas. Structures in
optical light by Hubble are colored red and
purple. By comparing the two, astronomers
determined that the chemical composition in
the region around where the hot gas is found
is like that of the wind from the central
star, but it is different from the cooler
outer material.
