The amazing image was taken on February 8 and shows the star V838 surrounded by a halo of light "a perfect spiral like we've never seen before",
The amazing image was taken on February 8 and shows the star V838 Monocerotis (V838 Mon), surrounded by a halo of light "a perfect spiral like we've never seen before, of dust across billions of kilometers of interstellar space," NASA said in a press release.
The glow of the interstellar dust comes from the red giant in the center of the image, which gives the shape of a light bulb to the pulse of light that came out of it two years ago.
The space agency describes the picture as "an artist's picture made by nature".
The outburst of a star known as V838 Mon and located 20 light-years from Earth, is almost certainly the source of the layer of gas that the star itself is now illuminating.
The Hubble Space Telescope has imaged V838 Mon and its echoes of light several times since the star erupted in January 2002, to track the constant changes in the appearance of the dust as the pulse of light continues to expand and move away from the star at the speed of light. During the outburst event, the star that had been extremely faint until now suddenly became bright, and its luminosity became 600 times greater than our Sun. It was one of the brightest stars in the entire Milky Way until it faded again in April 2002. The properties of this star fit the definition of a "nova" - stars whose brightness suddenly increases due to thermonuclear explosions on its surface. However, the individual behavior of V838 Mon, and in particular its bright red color, are completely different from any other known nova to date.
Nature's artistic masterpiece will continue to change in the coming years as the light continues to scatter outward and then it will illuminate dark parts of the gas clouds. Astronomers expect the echo to remain visible to telescope observers for the rest of this decade.
Van Gogh painted "Starry Night" in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in the south of France, where he stayed in an insane asylum for about 13 months before committing suicide at the age of 37 in the city of Auber-sur-Oys near Paris in 1890.
