Helix Nebula Gleams Like a Golden Eye

A nearby planetary nebula shines like a huge golden eye in a new photo snapped by a telescope in Chile.
The image shows the Helix Nebula, which lies about 700 light-years from Earth in the constellation Aquarius, the Water Bearer. The picture was taken in infrared light by the European Southern Observatory's VISTA telescope, one of the instruments at ESO's Paranal Observatory.
The Helix Nebula is a planetary nebula, a strange object that forms when a star like our sun exhausts its hydrogen fuel. The star's outer layers expand and cool, creating a huge envelope of dust and gas. Radiation flowing from the dying star ionizes this envelope, causing it to glow.


The dying star at the heart of the Helix Nebula is evolving to become a white dwarf, a shrunken, super-dense object that can pack a sun's worth of material into a sphere the size of Earth. The star is visible as a tiny blue dot at the center of the picture, researchers said.
The Helix Nebula is a complex object composed of dust, ionized material and molecular gas, arrayed in an intricate, flowerlike pattern.


Helix is a planetary nebula, a strange object that forms when a star like our sun exhausts its hydrogen fuel. The star's outer layers expand and cool, creating a huge envelope of dust and gas. Radiation flowing from the dying star ionizes this envelope, causing it to glow.


Despite their name, planetary nebulas have nothing to do with planets. Rather, the term refers to their superficial resemblance to giant planets, when observed through early telescopes.