Whenever people look at the night sky, it is filled with bright shining stars. There are countless stars out there. Most of them look pretty much the same. However, apart from the brightness that varies, the experts at NASA through the lenses of the Hubble Space Telescope, they can see what truly happens to this distant object in the sky.
With the NGC 2022, located practically at the constellation Orion, the Hubble comes with imaging tools that reveal a big blob of gas that is circling around an aging star. The image surprised a lot of scientists considering that the phenomenon is just bizarre. However, the brightness of the big blob of gas is just one of those predictable results of a star that is approaching what seems like the end of its life.
Depending on their actual size and their basic makeup, stars can give birth to what may seem like a blob as they begin to age. For example, the Sun will eventually become the reg giant that it is. Perhaps, it might also explode. At the moment, the NGC 2022 remains to be the star that it is but at the heart of it, it knows what it will eventually be like.
In a blog post, NASA explains, "When the stars like the Sun grow older, they expand and some of them give off that red glow. This is one of the reasons why they are referred to as red giants. As they age, they begin to shed off some materials into space. At the same time, the core of the star begins to be smaller, that's why it is taking up so much space. As they do this, they begin to expel ultraviolet rays. This in turn is what is causing the expelled gas to glow of some sort."
The resulting object is then referred to by scientists as the planetary nebula. It was named as such because it is a bulbous appearance that can be likened to a planet. A star like that of the Sun, often poses a spell of doom for planets that orbit these stars. Some planets that float very near the star, at this stage, often get swallowed up by the star. Some experience the stripping of the atmosphere of the stars as it continues to shed gas.
For the people on Earth, they could expect things to go pretty wild when the Sun begins to enter its red phase. Although it remains to be seen whether it will grow bigger to swallow the Earth, scientists believe that if it grows bigger, it will be able to engulf Mercury and Venus first and will leave the Earth out of the fences. Thankfully, the transition of the sun isn't expected until after a billion years or so. For now, people can observe the glowing blobs floating in the sky.
