Postcard06: The Cat's Eye Nebula

Planetary nebulae represent the last phase in the lives of Sun-like stars. Hubble first revealed the Cat’s Eye Nebula's intricate structures in 1994. A new image reveals the full beauty of a bull's eye pattern of eleven or more concentric rings, or shells, around the Cat's Eye. Each ‘ring’ is actually the edge of a spherical bubble seen projected onto the sky. The star ejected its mass in a series of pulses at 1500-year intervals. Read more about the image here.

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