Stunning new photos of dying star

“Dying stars, called planetary nebulae, very often have rings such as those seen in this image, astronomers have found. This photo depicts the Cat’s Eye Nebula, one such dying star. It’s 3,000 light years away.

The rings, found in at least one third of all planetary nebulae, may be the key to explaining the final “gasp” of the central star as it bursts apart. Scientists describe these rings as a “nested Russian doll” structure, but it’s unclear how that structure is formed in the Cat’s Eye nebula.

In this detailed view from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, the so-called Cat’s Eye Nebula looks like the penetrating eye of the disembodied sorcerer Sauron from the film adaptation of “Lord of the Rings.”

The nebula, formally catalogued NGC 6543, is every bit as inscrutable as the J.R.R. Tolkien phantom character. Although the Cat’s Eye Nebula was among the first planetary nebula ever to be discovered, it is one of the most complex planetary nebulae ever seen in space. A planetary nebula forms when Sun-like stars gently eject their outer gaseous layers to form bright nebulae with amazing twisted shapes.

Hubble first revealed NGC 6543’s surprisingly intricate structures including concentric gas shells, jets of high-speed gas and unusual shock-induced knots of gas in 1994.

As if the Cat’s Eye itself isn’t spectacular enough, this new image, taken with Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), reveals the full beauty of a bull’s eye pattern of eleven or more concentric rings, or shells, around the Cat’s Eye. Each ‘ring’ is actually the edge of a spherical bubble seen projected onto the sky - which is why it appears bright along its outer edge.”