Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Cassiopeia (Cas)  ·  Contains:  Bubble Nebula  ·  NGC 7635
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NGC7635 - The Bubble Nebula, John Dziuba
NGC7635 - The Bubble Nebula
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NGC7635 - The Bubble Nebula

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NGC7635 - The Bubble Nebula, John Dziuba
NGC7635 - The Bubble Nebula
Powered byPixInsight

NGC7635 - The Bubble Nebula

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Description

The Bubble Nebula is formed by a super massive star that is 45 times more massive than the sun.  It is young type O star that is burning extremely bright and hot.  It has lost most of its outer hydrogen and is now fusing helium into heavier elements. The star is about 4 million years old, and in 10 million to 20 million years, it will likely detonate as a supernova.

The star is ejecting powerful "stellar wind" moving at over 4 million miles per hour.  This outflow sweeps up the cold, interstellar gas in front of it, forming the outer edge of the bubble much like a snowplow piles up snow in front of it as it moves forward.

As the surface of the bubble's shell expands outward, it slams into dense regions of cold gas on one side of the bubble. This asymmetry makes the star appear dramatically off-center from the bubble, with its location in the 2:30 position of the bubble.  Dense pillars of cool hydrogen gas laced with dust appear at the upper right of the picture.The Bubble Nebula is 7 light-years across – about one-and-a-half times the distance from our sun to its nearest stellar neighbor, Alpha Centauri – and resides 7,100 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cassiopeia.

The Bubble Nebula was discovered in 1787 by William Herschel.

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  • NGC7635 - The Bubble Nebula, John Dziuba
    Original
  • Final
    NGC7635 - The Bubble Nebula, John Dziuba
    D
  • NGC7635 - The Bubble Nebula, John Dziuba
    E

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NGC7635 - The Bubble Nebula, John Dziuba

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Southern Hemisphere Astro