NGC 7293 is nicknamed the Eye of God — but it's actually a star's corpse. Hubble captured this in October 2002 using three narrowband filters over 8.5 hours. The bright center is a white dwarf, the dead core of a sun-like star that ran out of fuel. The blue-green rings are oxygen and helium being blasted by ultraviolet radiation at 30,000 degrees. Those dark radial filaments? They're cometary knots — each one twice the size of our solar system, containing enough material to form new planets. Our Sun will create this exact scene in 5 billion years. We're staring at our own future.
#astronomy #helixnebula #planetarynebula
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