Cats Eye Nebula, pretty space picture Paperweight

A gorgeous paperweight featuring the pretty Cat's Eye nebula from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope. This famous nebula represents a stage of stellar evolution after a star like our Sun has burnt up all of its fuel. In this phase, a star becomes an expanding red giant and sheds some of its outer layers, eventually leaving behind a hot core that collapses to form a dense white dwarf star. A fast wind emanating from the hot core rams into the ejected atmosphere, pushes it outward, and creates the graceful filamentary structures.