At the heart of the double-lobed Toby Jug planetary nebula is the red-giant star HR3126, which at just 50 million years old, is considerably younger than the 4.6-billion-year-old sun. HR3126 ...

New observations of red giant stars suggest that massive planets or other objects orbiting dying stars help stir up stellar winds and shape planetary nebulae, researchers report in the Sept. 18 ...

The dominant theory of planetary nebula formation previously involved only a single star – the red giant itself. With only a weak gravitational hold on its outer layers, it sheds mass very ...

The Red Rectangle Nebula doesn’t merely look modern-art cubist bizarre. Its very light is strange, its composition is food for philosophy, and it remains a hot venue of current research. Located ...

A nebula is formed from the dying star's outer envelope, which is puffed off into space following the star's red giant phase. The Southern Ring Nebula was imaged in December 2022 by the James Webb ...

“We don’t know very much about how planetary systems behave after their star transitions from a red giant to a super long-lived white dwarf,” says Paul Byrne, a planetary scientist at ...

Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have observed enigmatic rings in the planetary nebula NGC 1514, ...

A nebula is formed from the dying star's outer envelope, which is puffed off into space following the star's red giant phase. The Southern Ring Nebula was imaged in December 2022 by the James Webb ...

Thanks to the James Webb telescope, we can now see the nebula with more clarity. As one expert says, "We always knew planetary nebulae were pretty. What we see now is spectacular." ...

It’s inevitable; in about 5 billion years our sun will burn up all of the hydrogen in its core, then it will swell into a red giant, eating Mercury and Venus before collapsing.

First, the basics: A nebula is a giant cosmic cloud of gas and dust. The word 'nebula' comes from Latin, meaning "little mist ...