<div style="text-align: justify; "><span style="font-size: 1rem;"><b>Roughly 3,000 light-years from Earth sits one of the most complex and least understood nebulae, a whirling landscape of gas and dust left in the wake of a star’s death throes. A new computer visualization reveals the 3-D structure of the Cat’s Eye nebula and hints at how not one, but a pair of dying stars sculpted its complexity.</b></span><br></div><div style="text-align: justify; "><br></div><div style="text-align: justify; ">The digital reconstruction, based on images from the Hubble Space Telescope, reveals two symmetric rings around the nebula’s edges. The rings were probably formed by a spinning jet of charged gas that was launched from two stars in the nebula’s center, Ryan Clairmont and colleagues report in the October Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.</div><div style="text-align: justify; "><br></div><div style="text-align: justify; ">“I realized there hasn’t been a comprehensive study of the structure of the nebula since the early ’90s,” says Clairmont, an undergraduate at Stanford University. Last year, while a high school student in San Diego, he reached out to a couple of astrophysicists at a scientific imaging company called Ilumbra who had written software to reconstruct the 3-D structure of astronomical objects.</div><div style="text-align: justify; "><br></div><div style="text-align: justify; ">The team combined Hubble images with ground-based observations of light in several wavelengths, which revealed the motions of the nebula’s gas. Figuring out which parts were moving toward and away from Earth helped reveal its 3-D structure.</div><div style="text-align: justify; "><br></div><div style="text-align: justify; ">The team identified two partial rings to either side of the nebula’s center. The rings’ symmetry and unfinished nature suggest they are the remains of a plasma jet launched from the heart of the nebula, then snuffed out before it could complete a full circle. Such jets are usually formed through an interaction between two stars orbiting one another, says Ilumbra partner Wolfgang Steffen, who is based in Kaiserslautern, Germany.</div><div style="text-align: justify; "><br></div><div style="text-align: justify; ">The work won Clairmont a prize at the 2021 International Science and Engineering Fair, an annual competition run by the Society for Science, which publishes Science News. Steffen was skeptical about the tight deadline — when Clairmont reached out, he had just two months to complete the project.</div><div style="text-align: justify; "><br></div><div style="text-align: justify; ">“I said that’s impossible! Not even Ph.D. students or anybody has tried that before,” Steffen says. “He did it brilliantly. He pulled it all off and more than we expected.” SN</div><div style="text-align: justify; "><br></div><div style="text-align: justify; ">&nbsp;bnbd24/kh</div>