Stellar Headlights

Like headlights shining through a fog bank, powerful beams of light shine through a cloud of dust around a dying star in this new image from Hubble Space Telescope. The entire object is known as the Egg Nebula. The star is shedding its outer layers and soon only its core, a white dwarf, will remain. The shedding process, which is still in its early stages, produces periodic "puffs" of material, which show up as concentric rings in this image. In one of those puffs, the star expelled a thick cloud of dust, which enwraps the star in a dense cocoon that is visible at the center of the image. Beams of light have tunneled through the cloud, shining into the surrounding nebula. This process represents the early stages of a planetary nebula, which is a colorful bubble of expelled material around a star's dead core. [ESA/NASA]