Sometimes, you just need to give your mind a little vacation. And these days, outer space seems as good a destination as any other. Thankfully, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is here to give us a dazzling new image of the Helix Nebula.
Discovered in the early 19th century, the Helix Nebula resides in the constellation Aquarius. (Indicate the 5th dimension.) Approximately 655 light-years away, it is one of the closest planetary nebulae to Earth. When zoomed out, it’s easy to see why it’s nicknamed the Eye of God or the Eye of Sauron. This 2004 image from the Hubble telescope shows this.
What we are seeing in the nebula is, in a way, a moment of death that prepares the ground for a new birth. The dying star (out of frame in the nearest new image) sheds its outer layers. As the expelled gas and dust cools, they provide the raw material that may someday form new stars and perhaps planetary systems.
The new image from Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) provides a much closer, higher-resolution view.
Pillar-like red nodes in the Helix Nebula
The pillars you see are called cometary nodes, and this image is our best view of those pillars to date. “Here, fierce winds of hot gas from the dying star are colliding with the cooler plume of dust and gas it shed earlier in its life, sculpting the nebula’s remarkable structure,” ESA writes in its press release.
The colors of the knots represent temperature and chemistry. Blue signals indicate the hottest gas (activated by ultraviolet light). The yellow regions, where hydrogen atoms form molecules, are farther from the nebula’s nucleus (and therefore cooler). At the edges, red-orange regions represent the coldest material, where gas thins and dust begins to form.
<a href