SPACEPHOTOS

Ant-like Space Structure Previews Death of Our Sun. From ground-based telescopes, the so-called 'ant nebula' (Menzel 3, or Mz3) resembles the head and thora of a garden-variety ant. This dramatic NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image, showing 10 times more detail, reveals the 'ant's' body as a pair of fiery lobes protruding from a dying, Sun-like star. The Hubble images directly challenge old ideas about the last stages in the lives of stars. By observing Sun-like stars as they approach their deaths, the image of Mz3 shows that our Sun's fate probably will be more interesting, comple, and striking than astronomers imagined just a few years ago. Though approaching the violence of an eplosion, the ejection of gas from the dying star at the center of Mz3 has intriguing symmetrical patterns unlike the chaotic patterns epected from an ordinary eplosion. Scientists using Hubble would like to understand how a spherical star can produce such prominent, non-spherical symmetries in the gas that it ejects.