This is the Cat's Eye nebula.
It's in the constellation Draco, about 3,100
light years from us.
It's called the Cat’s Eye nebula
because of the resemblance, the appearance of cat's eyes.
We have at the very center of it a bright star.
The star has been in the process of dying for many thousands of years.
When the star gets near the end of its life, it expands inside
as it runs out of hydrogen at the center and has to turn to fusing helium
instead of hydrogen.
The star expands,
and it can get very unstable as you get near the end of its lifetime,
which is when it starts throwing off these pulses of material.
You see rings here, a whole set of 11 different rings
that go all the way around
the star, that almost look like tree rings.
In addition to these rings of light that you see, you see these pointed
nebula, which are jets of material coming out along the north
and south magnetic poles.
I love to
think of this as providing us a fossil record in the same way
that if you look through your layers of stone
or you look through a slice of a tree or you see the tree rings,
it allows you to see what was happening at different periods of time
in the history of the star.
So, somewhere like 15,000 years ago is when the instability stage of the star
occurred and started throwing off material to form the rings of dust.
And then more recently, a thousand years ago, it started throwing off the hot gases,
which are glowing at the center and give you the very intricate patterns
and structures that you see now.
So you've got jets coming out of the magnetic poles.
You have ellipsoids and circles of hot gas, and you've got
spherically symmetric rings of dust, all wrapped up in one little package.
It's the foundations for the next generation of stars.
So this material gets thrown out into what we call the interstellar medium,
the space between the stars and the material in that space between the stars.
And that will later on collect together gravitationally,
will pull together and form new stars and new solar systems.