Astronomers at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) have captured a stunning image of the Dragon’s Egg Nebula, classified as HD 148937. This new observation reveals that there were originally three stars in the system, until two of them clashed and merged.
The merger was so violent that the event created the surrounding cloud and forever altered the system’s fate. What surprised researchers was that the nebula surrounding the stars, known as NGC 6164/6165, were found to be hundreds of times younger than both stars. This nebula also revealed very high amounts of nitrogen, carbon and oxygen, elements typically found deep inside a star, not outside.
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When doing background reading, I was struck by how special this system seemed. A nebula surrounding two massive stars is a rarity, and it really made us feel like something cool had to have happened in this system. When looking at the data, the coolness only increased,” said Abigail Frost, an astronomer at ESO in Chile.
