M57: The Ring Nebula (Nov. 15 2009)
M57, the Ring Nebula, looks to most astronomers like a ring in the sky hence its name. I agree with that statement but I personally think it looks more like some sort of geothermal spring in which the color comes from pigmented bacteria which strive in the mineral rich water. It is now known to be a planetary nebula which is a gas cloud emitted at the end of a Sun-like star's existence. As one of the brightest planetary nebula on the sky, the Ring Nebula can be seen with a small telescope in the constellation of Lyra. The Ring Nebula is about 4,000 light years away, and is nearly 500 times the diameter of our Solar System. In this picture taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1998, dust filaments and globules are visible far from the central star. This helps indicate that the Ring Nebula is not spherical, but cylindrical.
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