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Peering into the Sun’s Future with Gemini North
5 Enero 2009: The newest addition to the Gemini Legacy imaging program is a laser-guide-star enabled near-infrared image of the well-known planetary nebula NGC 7027 (Figure 1). NGC 7027 lies at a distance of about 3,000 light-years from Earth and is located in the direction of the constellation Cygnus. The nebula itself is approximately 14,000 astronomical units from end-to-end, about 140 times larger than our Solar System. NGC 7027 is a planetary nebula, so-named because early observers with small telescopes thought that these targets resembled fuzzy ‘planets’ in the sky. We now know that objects like NGC 7027 are not planets, but the name has stuck throughout the years. We also know that objects like NGC 7027 give us a tantalizing peek into the future of our own Sun. Toward the end of their lives, when they get close to exhausting all of the nuclear fuel they are born with, stars like the …
