Cosmic bat and mineral moon in astronomical images of the week

Every week, in Space Gaze Programwe show two astronomical images that stood out this past week. And last week, we presented two more images from a series in which we will show astrophotographs produced here in Brazil, by Brazilians. Check it out:

The first image is a beautiful and terrifying vision of the future of our Solar System. The Helix Nebula, or NGC 7293, is what astronomers know as a “planetary nebula”, the result of the last stages of the life of a star similar in size to the Sun. Stars like ours, when they run out of hydrogen in their core and helium, chemical elements that serve as fuel for nuclear fusion, they start to fuse heavier atoms, which generate more energy. As a result, the star swells, becomes a red giant and ends up expelling gases from its outer layers. After this process, where there was a hot and active star, only a white dwarf remains, like a stellar corpse that is gradually cooling, and a planetary nebula formed by the material ejected from the star. The Helix Nebula is located just 200 light-years away, in the direction of the Aquarius Constellation.

Original in: https://www.apodbrazil.com/images/193

Eclipse on Jupiter

The second image shows a solar eclipse that occurred more than 600 million kilometers away. On the night of the 8th, Ganymede, one of Jupiter's Galilean moons, passed between the planet and the Sun, generating a cone of shadow that was projected onto the surface of the Gas Giant. Unlike what happens on Earth, eclipses on Jupiter are frequent. Thanks to the alignment of Jupiter's orbital plane and its four largest satellites, at least one solar eclipse like this occurs every 4 days. Ganymede, in this case, generates a solar eclipse approximately every 10 days. When Galileo Galilei observed this regularity in the eclipses of Jupiter's moons, he suggested that this could be used as a cosmic clock, and it was later from these phenomena that the speed of light was first measured by Ole Rømer.

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