The glorious, billowing Southern Ring Nebula is the cocoon of a dying star — and it has a secret. Scientists have found this nebula to exhibit a double-ring structure that evidences not one, but ...

Planetary nebulae represent a brief, yet illuminating, phase in the evolution of low- to intermediate-mass stars. These glowing shells of ionised gas are shed in the late stages of stellar development ...

The Hubble community bids farewell to the soon-to-be decommissioned Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 onboard NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. In tribute to Hubble’s longest-running optical camera, ...

Polar dunes on Mars, swirling clouds on Jupiter, and stunning sights in the night sky on Earth are featured this week. Plus, ...

In the cold dark of the constellation Ophiuchus, a faint, wraithlike shell of gas is quietly advertising the fate that awaits our own Sun. Astronomers call it the Little Ghost Nebula, a planetary ...

If you have access to an 8-inch or larger telescope, look in the northern part of the constellation Andromeda the Princessfor ...

Oregon stargazers have plenty of reasons to look up throughout August – a month marked by meteor showers, planetary conjunctions, and even a visible nebula. A formation known as the "dumbbell nebula" ...

Some 3,000 light years away, shimmering layers of gas formed an almost perfect sphere around the faintly glowing, burned-out core of a dead star. The result looks like a giant crystal ball floating in ...

(Please attempt/guess/answer the poll before reading the 'spoilered' calculations.) A question I've pondered, on occasion, is how much "mass" is in a 'planetary nebula' (the kind of nebula which ...

Oh what a beautiful cosmic web we weave! This little cosmic creepy crawler is the Red Spider planetary nebula (formal designation NGC 6537). It can be found about 4,000 light-years away in the ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. An award-winning reporter writing about stargazing and the night sky. It’s one of the most common words used by astronomers—and ...