Eerie brain-like nebula captured in stunning new JWST images
Nebula PMR1 looks like an electrified brain inside a semitransparent skull
NASA/ESA/CSA/STSCI (image); Joseph DePasquale/STSCI (image processing)
The death of a star never looks so beautiful. New images captured by the James Webb Space Telescope reveal what looks an awful lot like a brain floating in space and housed inside a semitransparent skull.
this is “Exposed Skull” NebulaAlso known as Nebula PMR 1. Located in the Vela constellation, about 5,000 light years away, it is a massive, dying star that is coming to the end of its fuel-burning life. As the star dies, it is shedding layers of its material, creating a cloud 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 clouds of gas and dust — just like the longitudinal fissure that separates the right and left hemispheres of our brains. In the nebula, this feature may be caused by a jet coming from the dying star, which pushes out the internal gas. The outer layers of gas are composed mostly of simple hydrogen, but the inner gas clouds are more complex.
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It is 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, after which it will become a white dwarf, a dense object that astronomers believe will cool over time to become a black dwarf – a cool, dark object that exists only in theory, perhaps because the universe is too small for anything to form.
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