NASA's trivia puzzle: Can you guess the Hubble Image? All about the Cat's Eye Nebula

The United States Space Agency, NASA, shared an interesting trivia puzzle with followers on social media site Instagram. Captioned with a cat emoji, NASA asked users to guess what image the dynamic puzzle made up.

“We’ve got another Hubble puzzle for you to solve. What do you think this image is? Comment your guess before time runs out!” the official account wrote.

It also gave participants hints at what the image was, adding: “Hint: A dying star created this cosmic object, casting off its outer layers of material in a series of pulses at 1,500-year intervals. And another hint: 🐱”

At the time of writing, the game, posted on February 21, had multiple replies guessing the cosmic image and had garnered 8,284 likes.

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Guess the Image

Take a look and see if you can guess what the image is.

Many users made a correct guess — labelling the image as the Cat's Eye Nebula. Others were happy to engage with NASA on a trivia quiz and some others were meme-ing responses and answers in the comments.

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What is the Cat's Eye Nebula?

According to the NASA website, its Hubble Space Telescope shows the Cat’s Eye Nebula (NGC 6543) to have a distinctive bull's-eye pattern with more than eleven concentric rings. Captured by Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), the image reveals spherical bubbles projecting a bright outer edge, forming each apparent ‘ring.’

According to observations, the star underwent mass ejections in 1,500-year intervals, resulting in the formation of dust shells. Remarkably, these shells collectively hold a mass equivalent to all the planets in our solar system, albeit only one percent of the Sun's mass. This process gives rise to a layered, onion-skin structure surrounding the dying star, akin to a cut onion where each layer is discernible.

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As per NASA, astronomers are surprised by the bull's-eye patterns around planetary nebulae, as the recurrence of mass loss episodes every 1,500 years was unexpected. Proposed explanations include cycles of magnetic activity similar to our Sun's sunspot cycle, the influence of companion stars orbiting the dying star, and stellar pulsations. Alternatively, some suggest that the material is smoothly ejected from the star, with the rings forming later due to the creation of waves in the outflowing material.