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NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day

🌌 NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day

Fliers Around the Blue Snowball Nebula Credit:

Date: 1996-11-22

Fliers Around the Blue Snowball Nebula
Credit:

View HD Image

Explanation:

Planetary nebulae are strange. First, they
are gas clouds and have nothing to do with our Solar System's
planets. Next, although hundreds of planetary nebulae
have been catalogued and thousands surely exist in our Galaxy,
aspects of the formation process are still debated. But now yet
another mystery has come to light: what created the fast-moving
gas clouds that appear around planetary nebula?
Dubbed FLIERs
for Fast Low-Ionization Emission Regions, these knots of dense
gas appear to have been ejected from the central star before
it cast of the planetary nebula. Currently, no model can account
for either their formation or longevity. In the above false-color picture
of NGC 7662, the Blue Snowball Planetary Nebula,
the FLIERs are featured in the image inserts.