To
some, it may look like a cat's eye. The alluring Cat's Eye nebula, however,
lies three thousand light-years from Earth across interstellar space. A classic
planetary nebula, the Cat's Eye (NGC 6543) represents a final, brief yet
glorious phase in the life of a sun-like star. This nebula's dying central star
may have produced the simple, outer pattern of dusty concentric shells by
shrugging off outer layers in a series of regular convulsions. But the
formation of the beautiful, more complex inner structures is not well
understood. Seen so clearly in this digitally sharpened Hubble Space Telescope
image, the truly cosmic eye is over half a light-year across. Of course, gazing
into this Cat's Eye, astronomers 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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