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    The Red Spider Nebula, caught by Webb

    October 29, 2025, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    The Red Spider Nebula, caught by Webb
    A large planetary nebula. The nebula’s central star is hidden by a blotchy pinkish cloud of dust. A strong red light radiates from this area, illuminating the nearby dust. Two large loops extend diagonally away from the center, formed of thin ridges of molecular gas, here colored blue. They stretch out to the corners of the view. A huge number of bright, whitish stars cover the background, also easily visible through the thin dust layers. Credit: European Space Agency

    This new NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope Picture of the Month features a cosmic creepy-crawly called NGC6537—the Red Spider Nebula. Using its Near-InfraRed Camera (NIRCam), Webb has revealed never-before-seen details in this picturesque planetary nebula with a rich backdrop of thousands of stars.

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    How Planetary Nebulae get their Shapes

    September 19, 2020, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Four planetary nebulae as seen by Hubble, showing four of many nebular morphologies. Astrononers used high spatial resolution millimeter-wavelength images of molecules in the winds of fourteen planetary nebulae to conclude that the widely varing shapes of planetary nebulae are primarily the result of the evolution of central stars with orbiting binary companions.
    NASA/HST

    About 7.5 billion years from now, our sun will have converted most of its hydrogen fuel into helium through fusion, and then burned most of that helium into carbon and oxygen. It will have swollen to a size large enough to fill the solar system nearly to the current orbit of Mars, and lost almost half of its mass in winds...

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    Dying Stars Breathe Life into Earth: Study

    July 7, 2020, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    NGC 7789, also known as Caroline’s Rose, is an old open star cluster of the Milky Way, which lies about 8,000 light-years away toward the constellation Cassiopeia. It hosts a few White Dwarfs of unusually high mass, analyzed in this study.
    Credit: Guillaume Seigneuret and NASA

    As dying stars take their final few breaths of life, they gently sprinkle their ashes into the cosmos through the magnificent planetary nebulae. These ashes, spread via stellar winds, are enriched with many different chemical elements, including carbon.

    Findings from a study published today in Nature Astronomy show that the final breaths of these dying stars, called white dwarfs, shed light on carbon’s origin in the Milky Way.

    “The findings pose new, stringent constraints on how and when carbon was produce...

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    Giant Bubbles on Red Giant Star’s surface

    December 21, 2017, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Astronomers using ESO's Very Large Telescope have directly observed granulation patterns on the surface of a star outside the Solar System -- the ageing red giant ?1 Gruis. This remarkable new image from the PIONIER instrument reveals the convective cells that make up the surface of this huge star. Each cell covers more than a quarter of the star's diameter and measures about 120 million kilometres across. Credit: ESO

    Astronomers using ESO’s Very Large Telescope have directly observed granulation patterns on the surface of a star outside the Solar System — the ageing red giant ?1 Gruis. This remarkable new image from the PIONIER instrument reveals the convective cells that make up the surface of this huge star. Each cell covers more than a quarter of the star’s diameter and measures about 120 million kilometres across. Credit: ESO

    Astronomers using ESO’s Very Large Telescope have for the first time directly observed granulation patterns on the surface of a star outside the Solar System – the ageing red giant Ï€1 Gruis. This remarkable new image from the PIONIER instrument reveals the convective cells that make up the surface of this huge star, which has 350 times the diameter of the Sun...

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