The European Space Agency released an image of a brilliant blue glowing gas cloud called the Thor's Helmet nebula.
The nebula, technically called NGC 2359, was given its nickname because of the arching arms of gas originating in its central bulge and curving towards the top left of the image, creating a shape resembling the Norse god's winged helmet.
The neon colors seen in the image provide clues to the object's composition; the bright blue patches represent X-ray emissions while the pale red and green areas come from ionized hydrogen and oxygen. The X-rays were captured by the EPIC cameras on ESA's XMM-Newton space observatory and the ionization by the Stars and Shadows Remote Observatory South at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory.
The strong X-ray emissions come from a star at the center of the nebula. The star is a Wolf-Rayet named HD 56925, which is considered to be elderly and is pushing out enormous amounts of material at a mind-bending pace. It is believed to lose a mass equivalent to the Sun in less than 100,000 years in the form of an extremely strong wind.
The nebula's violent interior is believed to have influenced its "messy" shape; it consists of a central bubble surrounded by gaseous filaments (channels of dust and bright outbursts) where material has been picked up by the stellar wind and hurled in to gas, causing rippling shock waves. The blue patches in the stunning image represent the nebula's hottest regions, such as the central bubble and gases are believed to soar to tens of millions of degrees.
