Chat with astronomer Rodolfo Montez Jr. Ask questions about the beautiful death throes of Sun-like stars and the ultimate fate of the Sun. Rodolfo Montez Jr. is an astronomer at Vanderbilt University.
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At the end of its life, the Sun will bloat into a red giant, and its outer layers will drift away to create a glowing planetary nebula like these examples. This gallery of planetary nebula is a set of composite images by two NASA space telescopes.
The image from the Chandra X-ray Observatory is shown in purple, and traces shock waves within the nebula. The red, green, and blue detailed images are from the Hubble Space Telescope.
Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/RIT/J.Kastner et al.; Optical: NASA/STScI