Halloween's just around the corner, so here's my attempt at a Halloween-themed picture. And what's more 'halloweenish' than corpses?
What do you mean that's not the "right kind" of corpse?
No fluffy write up for this one, just an old, dead star about to reach the final stage of its undeath and finally cool into a white dwarf. Surrounding it, like a burial-shroud, is a planetary nebula, formed from its outer layers.
As planetary nebulae are a form of emission nebula, once the parent star stops producing ultraviolet radiation and ionizing the gas that makes it up, it will fade into invisibility, until such a time that a strong source of ionizing radiation (gamma rays, x rays, strong ultraviolet) passes by to light it up again.
Our view in this case is from near a former Oort Cloud object, probably the size of Ceres.
