The death of a star never looked so beautiful. New images captured by the James Webb Space Telescope reveal what looks eerily like a brain floating in space and housed inside a semitransparent skull.
This is the “Exposed Cranium” Nebula, also known as Nebula PMR 1. Located some 5,000 light-years away in the constellation Vela, it’s the result of a massive, moribund star coming to the end of its fuel-burning life. As the star dies, it is shedding layers of its material, generating billowing clouds of gas and dust.
The new images show the nebula in both near- and mid-infrared light, revealing a dark channel that runs through the middle of the clouds of gas and dust—just like the longitudinal fissure that separates our brain’s right and left hemispheres. In the nebula, this feature may be caused by jets coming from the dying star, pushing the inner gas out. The outer layer of gas is mostly made up of simple hydrogen, but the inner gas clouds are more complex.
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It’s unclear what will happen to the dying star. If it is massive enough, it will explode into a supernova. But if not, it will deteriorate until only its core remains, at which point it will become a white dwarf, a dense object that astronomers believe cools over time to become a black dwarf—a cold, dark object that exists only in theory, perhaps because the universe is too young for any to have formed.