NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has captured its clearest image yet of the Egg Nebula, a pre-planetary nebula situated almost 1,000 light-years away in the Cygnus constellation. The nebula’s central star is hidden behind a dense dust cloud, with twin beams of light escaping through polar openings to illuminate concentric arcs of gas and dust. As a rare example of a late-stage Sun-like star nearing the planetary nebula phase, the Egg Nebula offers astronomers a unique opportunity to study stellar evolution, mass ejection, and the processes that seed dust for planet formation across the galaxy.
