The Little Dumbbell Nebula's fabulous looks might distract from one obvious visual anomaly. The object, located 3,400 light-years away in the constellation Perseus, is on its side.
"It will vanish in about 15,000 years," NASA officials write in the image description published on Tuesday. "Given our Solar System is 4.6 billion years old, the entire nebula is a flash in the pan by cosmological timekeeping."
The side-on ring results from gas in space tracing the former orbit of a long-gone star. It's missing, likely owing to the nebula's creator gobbling it up.
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