Close-up: The Helix Nebula in Aquarius | James Webb Space Telescope FriendsofNASA.org: A new image from the James Webb Space Telescope of a portion of the Helix Nebula highlights comet-like knots, fierce stellar winds, and layers of gas shed off by a dying star interacting with its surrounding environment. Webb’s image also shows the stark transition between the hottest gas to the coolest gas as the shell expands out from the central white dwarf. First spotted in the early 1800s, the Helix Nebul

Stunning image of the Helix Nebula reveals a brilliant tunnel of gases! ✨ A breathtaking new image of the Helix Nebula, captured by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and the 0.9-meter telescope at the National Science Foundation's Kitt Peak National Observatory, offers a fascinating view of this cosmic phenomenon. The image reveals a tunnel of bright gases stretching over a billion kilometers, creating a breathtaking sight. This brilliant tube appears almost directly towards Earth, making it seem mo

Sometimes sound gives us a different understanding of space 🧬 The Helix Nebula, 655 light-years away and three light-years across, was created as a low-mass star shed its outer material near the end of its life. In this sonification, scientists have assigned lower pitches to red light and higher pitches to blue light. Just as the frequencies of light increase from red to blue, frequencies of sound increase from low to high pitches. For more Hubble sonifications: https://go.nasa.gov/30ddyAT Soni

Across the Helix Nebula ✨ This video compares images of the Helix Nebula from three observatories: Hubble’s image in visible light, Spitzer’s infrared view, and Webb’s high-resolution near-infrared look. Webb's image comes from the #NIRCam instrument and it's the clearest infrared view of the Helix Nebula. It brings into full focus the structure of the gas being shed by the central star, revealing how dying stars cast their material back into the cosmos, seeding future generations of stars and p