Credit: NASA/JPL–Caltech/UCLA

A glow­ing jel­ly­fish floats in a starry sea. Instead of float­ing in water, what appears to be a translu­cent sea crea­ture is actu­ally a dying star sur­rounded by rings of glow­ing gas in this new image from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Sur­vey Explorer.

Explore the image of NGC 1514, also known as the Crys­tal Ball Neb­ula. The object is a close pair of dying stars; so close WISE can­not dis­tin­guish between them. Two unusual dust rings, shown in orange, sur­round the stars as well as other mate­r­ial, shown in green. The WISE tele­scope shows astronomers the uni­verse in infrared light. The tele­scope basi­cally sees heat, so what we see in this pic­ture isn’t actu­ally what our eyes would see. Astronomers have given cer­tain wave­lengths of light cer­tain col­ors so we can bet­ter under­stand what we are see­ing. In the image at the left, we see the Crys­tal Ball Neb­ula as our eyes see it through ground-based telescopes.

NGC 1514 is located about 800 light-years away toward the zodi­a­cal con­stel­la­tion Tau­rus, the Bull. Tau­rus is one of thir­teen con­stel­la­tions that the Sun moves through through­out the year.

NGC 1514 is a plan­e­tary neb­ula. As stars sim­i­lar to our Sun reach the end of their lives, they puff off their outer lay­ers. A white-hot core called a white dwarf is all that is left behind. As the bub­ble expands, the white dwarf star floods the sur­round­ing region with intense radi­a­tion caus­ing the gas to glow like a neon sign. Far in the future, this dead star will even­tu­ally fade as it becomes a warm ember. Our Sun will not reach this stage of its life for another 4 bil­lion years or so.

Some­times these bub­bles of gas and dust form round orbs sur­round­ing the star. Other times, but­ter­fly shapes appear. But in other cases, when two stars are involved, the puff­ing out of gas becomes more com­plex. The two rings are new to astronomers. Sci­en­tists spec­u­late that the rings formed when jets of mate­r­ial from one of the stars hit walls of a bub­ble of dust sur­round­ing the other star.

Plan­e­tary neb­ula have noth­ing to do with plan­ets. As astronomers in the 17th and 18th cen­turies explored and cat­a­loged the sky through new tele­scopes, they found round, fuzzy objects that resem­bled the orbs of Uranus and Nep­tune. British astronomer William Her­schel dis­cov­ered NGC 1514 in 1790. He was sur­prised to find a “shin­ing fluid” sur­round­ing the object. Orig­i­nally, he thought that NGC 1514 and other sim­i­larly fuzzy objects were clus­ters of stars. But NGC 1514 con­vinced him that the blobs were actu­ally a new astro­nom­i­cal phenomenon.

WISE scans the entire sky in infrared light pick­ing up the faint glow of far-off objects. The orbit­ing obser­va­tory is joined in space by two other infrared obser­va­to­ries; NASAs Spitzer Space Tele­scope and Her­schel Space Obser­va­tory from the Euro­pean Space Agency. These infrared obser­va­to­ries detect heat from objects in space, even the barely notice­able heat of a cool star. The WISE mis­sion dif­fers from the other two by scan­ning the entire sky. Astronomers using this tech­nique have seen all sorts of pre­vi­ously unseen cos­mic trea­sures, such as cool stars, bright galax­ies, comets, aster­oids that pass near Earth.