The Beautiful Cat's Eye Nebula

Photo courtesy of NASA.
Planetary nebulae are some of the most beautiful and interesting objects in the universe. When a sun-like star ages to the point where the nuclear reactions in its core come to an end, the helium gas continues to burn. As a result, an outer shell of gas expands around the star creating one of God's most unique mosaics.

In a nutshell, a nebula consists of a hot, blue-white central star enveloped by a shell of expanding gas. In 1784, William Herschel invented the term Planetary Nebula to describe these types of objects because they sort of resembled the planet he had recently discovered - Uranus.

As you can see in today's stunning picture of the Cat's Eye Nebula, the Hubble Space Telescope has given us the ability to see distant objects more clearly and "close-up" than Herschel and his contemporaries could have even imagined.

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