The most massive stars — furiously hot, blue-white orbs — shine brightly for a few million years and end their lives in spectacular explosions.

Planetary nebulae form when red giant stars expel their outermost layers as they run out of helium fuel — becoming hot, dense white dwarf stars that are roughly the size of Earth.

Something is amiss in the Butterfly Nebula. When a team led by astronomers at the University of Washington compared two exposures of this planetary nebula that had been taken by the Hubble Space ...

The nebula's multi-polar and swiftly changing interior structure is not easy to explain using existing models of how planetary nebulae form and evolve, according to Balick.

In the excerpt below, Sutter (whose writing you may recognize as a frequent contributor to Space.com) introduces planetary nebulas and explains why, while they're a perennial star of Hubble Space ...

A new study captured the patterns of stellar winds in unprecedented detail, discovering how planetary nebulae get their colorful shapes.