I love planetary nebulae; they are among my favorite objects in the sky. First, of course, they are beautiful: eerie rings, ellipses, flowing gas, symmetry. Second, they are poetic: the dying gasps of a sun-like star, ejecting septillions of tons of gas that glows and forms these dramatic objects. And they all have a tale to tell. One of the best stories belongs to the Helix Nebula. And it's telling it loud.
Oh yes, you want to click that to embiggen it. That picture is in fact the Helix: a star that was once not unlike the Sun, now undergoing paroxysms, blasting out a super stellar wind of gas. The naked core of the star is white hot -- 120,000 Celsius, 25 times hotter than the Sun! -- flooding the gas with ultraviolet light, causing it to fluoresce like a neon sign (in fact, neon can be seen in the ...
