The Little Dumbbell Nebula, also known as Messier 76, M76, NGC 650/651, the Cork Nebula, and the Barbell 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. To commemorate the 34th anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope’s launch on April 24, 1990, a new image of the Little Dumbbell Nebula was shared on April 23, 2024.
The image comes from the newest data stored at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, totaling 184 terabytes of information. Despite its name, the Little Dumbbell Nebula is not the remains of a planet. It is an expanding shell of gas and dust ejected from a red giant star that collapsed into a dense, hot white dwarf star. The white dwarf star is one of the hottest white dwarf remnants known, with a temperature of 216,000 degrees Fahrenheit (120,000 degrees Celsius).
The new image from Hubble shows the Little Dumbbell Nebula as two lobes of glowing gas and dust on both sides of a central bar. Scientists believe that the rings were caused by a second star that the central white dwarf star consumed. The rest of