A Planetary Nebula Gallery
Wednesday, October 10, 2012 - 15:01
in Astronomy & Space
This gallery shows four planetary nebulas from a survey of such objects in the solar neighborhood made with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. X-ray emission from Chandra is colored purple and optical emission from the Hubble Space Telescope is colored red, green and blue. A planetary nebula is a phase of stellar evolution that the sun should experience several billion years from now, when becomes a red giant and then sheds most of its outer layers.