This image taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows the colourful last breath of a star like our Sun. The star is ending its life by casting off its outer layers of gas, which formed a cocoon around the star’s remaining core. Ultraviolet light from the dying star makes the material glow. The burned-out star, called a white dwarf, is the white dot in the centre. Our Sun will eventually burn out like this and shroud itself with stellar debris, but not for around another five billion years. Our Milky Way Galaxy is littered with these stellar relics, called planetary nebulae. The objects have nothing to do with planets, they were just called this because through small telescopes they resembled the disks of the distant planets Uranus and Neptune. This planetary nebula is called NGC 2440 (pic: NASA/ESA/K. Noll/STScI)
