ExploraTour: A Peek into the Lives of the Stars
A Beautiful Example of a Planetary Nebula.
This is an image of the "Cat's Eye" nebula taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. It is a planetary nebula.
The gas clouds making up the nebula are the outer layers of a star blown off during the final stages of its life some thousand years ago (during the time when Kings and their armies of Knights ruled in Medieval Europe).
The remnant of this star still exists at the center of the nebula as a white dwarf. The intricate structures seen in the expanding gas cloud are thought to have been produced by the gravitational effects of a companion star to the white dwarf. The stellar pair are too close together to be seen separately by the Hubble Telescope.