In death, there can be great beauty.
Astronomers pointed the powerful James Webb Space Telescope at planetary nebula NGC 1514, where a star is shedding copious amounts of gas into the universe as it gradually exhausts its fuel and shrinks down into a dense core — a shell of its former self. The resulting cosmic clouds — named a “planetary nebula” only because through the first telescopes these distant and roundish objects looked like planets — can be brilliant spectacles, and NGC 1514 is no different.
“We’ve come a long way since, with Webb’s mid-infared view being the most detailed view of a planetary nebula to date,” NASA posted online, in reference to NGC 1514.
(The Webb telescope views space in infrared light, a spectrum that’s invisible to the naked eye but cuts through the thick masses of clouds and gas that obstruct or limit our view of such far-off objects.)
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