NGC 7635 The Bubble Nebula

There are a lot of ways a star can die. It can quietly cool down without anyone noticing, or it can blow itself up, outshining the entire galaxy. This star decided to blow a cosmic bubble before ‘checking out’.

The maker of this scene is a massive star called SAO 20575, approximately 8,000 lightyears away from us. As it approaches its endstage, the hydrogen fusion that supports its life gradually exhausts, and heavier elements begin to fuse in its core. The massive amount of energy generated in this process blasts away the star’s outer layer, forming the cosmic bubble you see in the image. The radiation from the core then catches up with the outward drifting material, ionising it and causing it to glow. Different elements glow in different colours when ionized(similar to how neon lights work), and that produces the striking colours.

(The data was acquired from Telescopelive, which I processed using pixinsight and photoshop)