The Barbell Nebula, also known as Messier 76, M76, NGC 650/651, the Cork Nebula, and the Little Dumbbell Nebula, is a planetary nebula located 3,400 light-years away in the constellation Perseus. It is a popular target for telescopes in the summer in the Northern Hemisphere.
A new image of the Barbell Nebula was shared on April 23, 2024 to commemorate the 34th anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope’s launch on April 24, 1990. The image comes from data stored at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, totaling 184 terabytes of information.
The name “Barbell” comes from its shape that resembles a dumbbell. Despite its name, it is not made up of planetary remains but an expanding shell of gas and dust ejected from a red giant star that collapsed into a dense white dwarf star. The white dwarf star is one of the hottest white dwarf remnants known with a temperature of about 216 thousand degrees Fahrenheit (120 thousand degrees Celsius).
The Hubble image shows two lobes of glowing gas and dust on both sides of a central bar with rings created by a second star consumed by the central white dwarf star. The rest of the nebula comprises dust and gas ejected by the central star at incredible speeds of about 2 million mph (3.2 million km/h). The glowing effect is due to ultraviolet radiation from