Top Qs
Timeline
Chat
Perspective

Lemon Slice Nebula

Planetary nebula in the constellation Camelopardalis From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Lemon Slice Nebula
Remove ads

IC 3568 is a planetary nebula that is 1.3 kiloparsecs (4500 ly) away from Earth in the constellation of Camelopardalis (just 7.5 degrees from Polaris). It is a relatively young nebula and has a core diameter of only about 0.4 light years. It was dubbed the Lemon Slice Nebula by Jim Kaler, due to its appearance in one false-colour image from the Hubble Space Telescope.[3][4] The Lemon Slice Nebula is one of the most simple nebulae known, with an almost perfectly spherical morphology. The core of the nebula does not have a distinctly visible structure in formation and is mostly composed of ionized helium.[5] A faint halo of interstellar dust surrounds the nebula.

Quick Facts Emission nebula, Observation data: J2000 epoch ...
Thumb
False-colour image of the bright central region of IC 3568. This is the image that gave the nebula its common name.

The central star of the planetary nebula is a magnitude 12.8 O-type star with a spectral type of O(H)3. It is estimated to have a mass less than the Sun, a temperature of over 50,000 K, and a bolometric luminosity of about 2,400 L.[6]

IC 3568 was discovered on August 31, 1900 by the American astronomer Robert Grant Aitken while using Lick Observatory's 12" Clark refractor to observe comet Borrelly-Brooks. He noticed that the "star" BD+83°357 in Camelopardalis was actually a small nebula. He used the observatory's 36" refractor the next night to confirm that this was a round nebula.[7] IC 3568 was mistakenly classified as a compact galaxy in the Uppsala General Catalogue, as UGC 7731.[8]

Remove ads

See also

  • NGC 40 (the Bow-Tie Nebula in Cepheus)

References

Loading related searches...

Wikiwand - on

Seamless Wikipedia browsing. On steroids.

Remove ads