Blue Bubble
Recently, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope captured an image of a "blue bubble" cloud surrounding a star. It looks like a cool blue halo. It is made out of hydrogen, helium, and other gases, surrounding Wolf-Rayet star, known as WR 31a. The star is located 30,000 light years away from Earth. It also is a very large star, more than 20 times the mass of the Sun. As for the blue bubble, it is known as a Wolf-Rayet nebula.
This nebula formed from space winds interacting with the hydrogen ejecting from nearby stars. This blue bubble formed about 20,000 years ago. It is expanding at about 220,000 kilometers per hour or 136702 miles per hour, according to NASA.
The Hubble Space Telescope may have just barely captured such beauty because WR stars and WR nebulae live short lives, just a few 100,000 years. Compared to our Sun and other stars, that is nothing. Our own Sun is 4.5 billion years old and is expected to live many more years.
More on Wolf-Rayet Stars
Photo Credits: NASA
These stars are heterogeneous set of stars with unusual spectra. Basically, these stars burn very hot, anywhere from 30,000 to 200,000 degrees Kelvin, they also have very strong stellar winds (which is why nebulae tend to form like the blue bubble WR 31a and WR 124). These stars are usually stellar classification O, which are the hottest, brightest, and some of the most massive types of stars. (More on those types of stars in a later post.)
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