Helix Nebula (IMAGE)
Caption
The Helix Nebula and the cosmic recycling of stellar material. The bright central nebula surrounds a white dwarf, the remnant of the star that created it. Farther out, newly revealed bow shocks show fragments of material cast off by that star colliding with surrounding interstellar gas. The fragments become progressively smaller and more disrupted as they are stripped, shredded and mixed into space. The new MOTHRA data is shown in black, with previous data from the Hubble Space Telescope and the Kitt Peak 4m telescope in color.
Credit
Credit for the previous data: NASA, ESA, C. R. O’Dell (Vanderbilt University) and M. Meixner, P. McCullough and G. Bacon (Space Telescope Science Institute)
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