Wolf-Rayet bubble
The cosmic cauldron has brewed up a Halloween trick in the form of a ghostly face that glows in X-rays, as seen by ESA's XMM-Newton space telescope. The eerie entity is a bubble bursting with the fiery stellar wind of a 'live fast, die young' star. The bubble lies 5000 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Canis Major, the 'greater dog', and can be imagined to take on a dogor wolf-like face. It spans nearly 60 light-years across and was blown by the powerful stellar wind of the Wolf-Rayet star HD 50896 - the pink star near the centre of the image that makes up one of the object's piercing eyes. Wolf-Rayet bubbles are the result of a hot, massive star - typically greater than 35 the mass of our Sun - expelling material through a strong stellar wind. This star's howling wind is a million-degree plasma potion that emits X-rays, represented in blue in this image. Where this fierce wind ploughs into surrounding material it is lit up in red tones as seen in the 'cheek' of the face.
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