Donald Savage

Headquarters, Washington, DC December 17, 1997

(Phone: 202/358-1547)

Tammy Jones
Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD
(Phone: 301/286-5566)

Ray Villard
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, MD
(Phone: 410/338-4514)

RELEASE: 97-287

HUBBLE WITNESSES THE FINAL BLAZE OF GLORY OF SUN-LIKE STARS

The end of a sun-like star's life was once thought to be

simple: the star gracefully casting off a shell of glowing gas
and then settling into a long retirement as a burned-out white
dwarf.

Now, a dazzling collection of detailed views released today

by several teams of astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space
Telescope reveals surprisingly intricate glowing patterns spun
into space by aging stars: pinwheels, lawn sprinkler style jets,
elegant goblet shapes, and even some that look like a rocket
engine's exhaust.

"These eerie fireworks offer a preview of the final stage of

our own Sun's life," says Bruce Balick of the University of
Washington, Seattle. More than simply a stellar "light-show,"
these outbursts provide a way for heavier elements -
-predominantly carbon -- cooked in the star's core, to be ejected
into interstellar space as raw material for successive generations
of stars, planets and, potentially, life.

The astronomers say the incandescent sculptures are forcing

a re-thinking of stellar evolution. In particular, the patterns
may be woven by an aging star's interaction with unseen
companions: planets, brown dwarfs, or smaller stars.

"The first time we looked at the Hubble's breathtaking

pictures, we knew that our older and simpler ideas of how these
objects are formed had to be overhauled," said Howard Bond
of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), Baltimore MD.
"The basic question is: How do these nebulae shape themselves?"

"Hubble's colorful views are a feast for the eyes," said

Mario Livio, also of the STScI. "Their beauty is matched only by
the mystery."

Surprising new details revealed by the Hubble pictures

include:

* Unexplained disks and "donuts" of dust girdling a

star, which pinch outflowing gas. These may be linked to the
presence of invisible companions.

* Remarkably sharp, inner bubbles of glowing gas --

like a balloon inside a balloon -- blown out by the violently
outflowing gases called a "fast wind" (1000 miles/sec)
ejected during the final stages of a star's death.

* Strange, glowing "red blobs" placed along the edge of

some nebulae may be chunks of older gas caught in the stellar gale
of hot flowing material from the dying star.

* Jets of high-speed particles that shoot out in

opposite directions from a star, and plow through surrounding gas,
like a garden hose stream hitting a sand pile.

* Pinwheel patterns formed by symmetrical ejection of

material so that intricate structures are mirrored on the opposite
side of a star.

"We're still reveling in the quality of the data and the

wealth of new details. In the longer term, we're going to have to
confront these strikingly symmetric structures with some
fundamentally revised ideas about the final stages of a star's
life," said Balick. "The lovely patterns of gas argue that some
highly ordered and powerful process orchestrates the ways stars
lose their mass, completely unlike an explosion."

A long-standing puzzle is how these nebulae acquire their

complex shapes and symmetries. The red giant stars that preceded
their formation should have ejected simple, spherical shells of
gas. "Hubble's ability to see very fine structural details --
usually blurred beyond recognition in ground-based images --
enables us to look for clues to this puzzle," said Balick.
 Several teams of astronomers will be observing planetary
nebulae using new infrared instruments installed on the Hubble
Telescope last February. This way, astronomers can glimpse the
ejection of material at a very early stage long before the
expelled nebula starts to become visible optically. Given
Hubble's high resolution, astronomers also hope to revisit the
same nebula in a few years to actually see how the shell has
further expanded into space. Their observations will be compared
to predictions and either refine or dismiss current ideas on the
mass ejection mechanisms of dying stars.

"These nebulae observed by Hubble give us a preview of our

own Sun's fate. Some five billion years from now, after the Sun
has become a red giant and burned the Earth to a cinder, it will
eject its own beautiful nebula and then fade away as a white dwarf
star," warned Bond.

The Space Telescope Science Institute is operated by the

Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc. (AURA)
for NASA, under contract with the Goddard Space Flight Center,
Greenbelt, MD. The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of
international cooperation between NASA and the European Space
Agency (ESA).

-end-

EDITOR'S NOTE: Photos and captions are available to news media by

calling the Headquarters Broadcast and Imaging Branch at 202/358-
1900.

Color: B&W:
97-HC-802 97-H-802
97-HC-803 97-H-803

Images also are available at:

http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/PR/97/38.html and via links in

http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/Latest.html or
http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/Pictures.html.