"Zoom out, and you may recognize the cosmic scene as the famous Helix Nebula, known for its resemblance to the "Eye of Sauron" from the "Lord of the Rings" saga. Located 650 light years away, the iconic object is specifically what's known as a planetary nebula, but this classification is a misnomer: such nebulas have nothing to do with planets, and everything to do with stars."
"All that material it shed doesn't vanish into thin air. When animals die on Earth, they decompose and replenish the environment with nutrients, and a comparable process plays out with stellar deaths, only at a scale that could swallow the inner solar system, and over the course of millions of years. The nebula seeds the cosmos with heavier elements forged in the star and other materials crucial for forming future planetary star systems around other suns."
The James Webb Space Telescope's NIRCam instrument captured a close infrared view of the Helix Nebula's inner ring: a luminous, expanding cloud of hot material exuded by a star that shed its outer layers and left a white dwarf. The white dwarf now blasts the cloud with ionizing radiation. The Helix Nebula, 650 light years away, is a planetary nebula formed when a moderately massive star like the Sun became a red giant and cast off its shell. The expelled material seeds the cosmos with heavier elements for future planetary systems.
Read at Futurism
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