One of the justifications for building the Hubble Space Telescope was to finally get a detailed enough view  of the fuzzy blobs we call planetary nebulae that we could finally understand what is going on. Turns out, for some of the nebulae, we actually needed something even better than HST - and that “better than” is the JWST.  First catalogued in 1790 by William Herschel, NGC 1514 is a binary star system surrounded by a glowy blob of stuff. One of the stars is actually a stellar remnant - a hot white dwarf that has shed its atmosphere and stopped undergoing nuclear reactions in...

Object IRAS 23077+6707 The sky is littered with small fuzzy blobs that are chock full of science waiting to be understood. And one such fuzzy blob looks surreally like a butterfly.  Discovered in 2016, this object, cataloged as IRAS 23077+6707, is located about...

Infrared image of the shockwave (red arc) created by the massive giant star Zeta Ophiuchi in an interstellar dust cloud. The tenuous winds of sun-like main-sequence stars are much more difficult to observe. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech; NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team...