The Cat’s Eye Nebula is the name given to planetary nebula NGC 6543, located in the constellation Draco. Recently, scientists used the Hubble and Euclid space telescopes for research and obtained new interesting images.
Strange planetary nebula
This month, as part of the ESA/Hubble Picture of the Month project, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope teamed up with ESA’s Euclid telescope to create a new image of the most visually complex remnants of a dying star: the Cat’s Eye Nebula, also known as NGC 6543. This extraordinary planetary nebula has a complex, multi-layered structure. Observations made as part of ESA’s Gaia mission have made it possible to determine the distance to the nebula as approximately 4,300 light-years.
Planetary nebulae, named for their round shape when viewed through early telescopes, are actually expanding gas ejected by stars in the final stages of their evolution. Precisely in the Cat’s Eye Nebula, this fact was first discovered in 1864 — research into the spectrum of its light revealed the radiation of individual molecules specific to gas, which distinguishes planetary nebulae from stars and galaxies.
The combined efforts of the Hubble and Euclid telescopes
Here, the nebula is shown through the combined eyes of NASA/ESA’s Hubble Space Telescope and ESA’s Euclid, highlighting the extraordinary complexity of death.
Although Euclid is primarily designed to map the distant Universe, it also captures the Cat’s Eye Nebula as part of its deep sky surveys. In Euclid’s wide-angle image in near-infrared and visible light, the arcs and filaments of the bright central region of the nebula are located in a halo of colorful gas fragments moving away from the star.
This ring was ejected by the star at an earlier stage, before the main nebula formed in the center. The entire nebula stands out against the backdrop of distant galaxies, demonstrating how local astrophysical beauty and remote corners of space can be seen together in modern astronomical research.
The complex and amazing core of the NGC 6543 nebula
As part of this extensive survey of the nebula and its surroundings, the Hubble telescope captured the core of the gas cloud itself using high-resolution images in visible light, adding more detail to the center of this image. The data reveals a mosaic of concentric shells, high-speed gas jets, and dense knots formed by shock interactions — features that appear almost unreal in their complexity. It is believed that these structures record the episodic loss of mass by a dying star at the center of the nebula, creating a kind of cosmic fossilized trace of its final stages of evolution.
The combination of the Hubble telescope’s focused image with deep observations from the Euclid telescope not only highlights the nebula’s exquisite structure, but also places it in the broader context of the Universe that both space telescopes are exploring. These missions provide a rich and complementary view of NGC 6543, revealing the subtle interactions between the processes of the end of a star’s life and the vast space surrounding it.
According to phys.org
