                        Astronomy Picture of the Day

    Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our
     fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation w
                    ritten by a professional astronomer.

                               2021 November 7

                  The Cat's Eye Nebula in Optical and X-ray
     Image Credit: NASA, ESA, Hubble Legacy Archive; Chandra X-ray Obs.;
                      Processing & Copyright: Rudy Pohl

   Explanation: To some it looks like a cat's eye. To others, perhaps like
   a giant cosmic conch shell. It is actually one of brightest and most
   highly detailed planetary nebula known, composed of gas expelled in the
   brief yet glorious phase near the end of life of a Sun-like star. This
   nebula's dying central star may have produced the outer circular
   concentric shells by shrugging off outer layers in a series of regular
   convulsions. The formation of the beautiful, complex-yet-symmetric
   inner structures, however, is not well understood. The featured image
   is a composite of a digitally sharpened Hubble Space Telescope image
   with X-ray light captured by the orbiting Chandra Observatory. The
   exquisite floating space statue spans over half a light-year across. Of
   course, gazing into this Cat's Eye, humanity may well be seeing the
   fate of our sun, destined to enter its own planetary nebula phase of
   evolution ... in about 5 billion years.

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       Authors & editors: Robert Nemiroff (MTU) & Jerry Bonnell (UMCP)
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