Eerie brain-like nebula captured in stunning new JWST images

Eerie brain-like nebula captured in stunning new JWST images

By Claire Cameron edited by Clara Moskowitz

The death of a star has never looked so beautiful. New images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope reveal what looks eerily like a brain floating in space inside a semi-transparent skull.

This is the “Exposed Cranium” nebula, also known as Nebula PMR 1. Located about 5,000 light-years away in the constellation Vela, it is a massive, dying star nearing the end of its fuel-burning life. As the star dies, it sheds layers of material, generating billowing clouds of gas and dust.

The new images show the nebula in both near- and mid-infrared light, revealing a dark channel running through the center of the clouds of gas and dust – just like the longitudinal fissure that separates the right and left hemispheres of the brain. In the nebula, this feature may be caused by jets coming from the dying star, pushing the inner gas out. The outer layer of gas consists 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 decay until only its core remains, and then it will become a white dwarf, a dense object that astronomers believe will cool over time to become a black dwarf—a cold, dark object that exists only in theory, perhaps because the universe is too young for any to have formed.

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