Hubble snaps mystery green death nebula in NGC 1846 NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has captured an image of the death of a star in a nearby dwarf galaxy. Death of a star in the Globular Cluster NGC 1846 Hubble snapped the shot of the cumbersomely named Globular Cluster NGC 1846, a collection of hundreds of thousands of stars in the outer halo of the Large Magellanic Cloud, in …
...Remember it's false colour, so it may not actually *be* green ("colour" is somewhat hard to define in astronomy other than by wavelength of light). The light received may well be green if it's from [OIII] (forbidden Oxygen III transition) which is fairly common in planetary nebulae. (OK - it's more of a teal-type colour, but close enough).
Is it? I didn't see any mention either here or on space.com that it was false color. Doing a little more searching, I found a page stating "the cluster was observed in filters that isolate blue, green, and infrared starlight". So presumably that would mean the green is really green, and only the red channel is "false" (actually infrared).
http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2011/35/image/b/
Does that count as false color? I'm not sure, maybe stretching-the-truth color.
There are a few stars that look green(ish); the colour largely reflects temperature and there are many blue and red stars, not to mention yellow (in most cases its easier to see the colours in a telescope).
Note that colour is only partly correlated with age - some stars start off red and then just fade away
(providing a fine example to M. Hucknell).
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