Are you going to admire the beautiful night sky this winter? Then don’t miss the Eskimo Nebula. This bright planetary nebula can be spotted again in the constellation Gemini in the coming months.
The Eskimo Nebula (NGC 2392) was discovered in 1787 by William Herschel. The nebula has been given the name “Eskimo Nebula” because the object looks like a face surrounded by a fur collar. This nebula is sometimes referred to as the Clown Nebula (and you can probably guess why…). NGC 2392 is located 5,000 light-years from Earth and can be seen with a small telescope.
What do we see?
In reality, we’re looking at a planetary nebula with a dying sun-like star at its center. About 10,000 years ago, the star shed its outer layers of gas. These now form the ‘face’ of the Eskimo. This planetary nebula will continue to expand over the next thousands of years. The brightness also decreases, until this object is almost no longer visible.
The Eskimo’s fur collar is a disk of material surrounding the star that contains comet-like objects. Their tails point away from the central star.
The star in the center collapses in the future and becomes a white dwarf star. This is a very compact and extremely hot star, where nuclear reactions no longer take place. A white dwarf is often no bigger than Earth, but weighs on average 200,000 times more than our planet. The gravitational pull of a white dwarf is 100,000 times greater than Earth.
Our sun has a lifespan of ten billion years. Our parent star is currently about 4.5 billion years old. This means that the star will live for another five billion years. Like 90% of all stars, the sun will lose its outer layers of gas at the end of its life and transform into a planetary nebula. The sun becomes a white dwarf and cools over tens of billions of years. In the end, a black dwarf remains.
The photo at the top of this article was taken in 2000 with the Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field & Planetary Camera 2.