In death, there can be great beauty. Astronomers pointed the powerful James Webb Space Telescope at planetary nebula NGC 1514, where a star is shedding copious amounts of gas into the universe as it gradually exhausts its fuel and shrinks down into a dense core — a shell of its former self. The resulting cosmic clouds — named a "planetary nebula" only because through the first telescopes these distant and roundish objects looked like planets — can be brilliant spectacles, and NGC 1514 is no different. "We've come a long way since, with Webb's mid-infared view being the most detailed view of a planetary nebula to date," NASA posted online, in reference to NGC 1514. (The Webb telescope views space in infrared light, a spectrum that's invisible to the naked eye but cuts through the thick masses of clouds and gas that obstruct or limit our view of such far-off objects.) The image below shows a scene that has evolved over at least some 4,000 years, NASA explained. At the center of the gaseous structure are two stars tightly orbiting one another (a "binary star system), but from our distant view they appear as one vivid bright dot. Of the two stars, one is dying as it's spent the nuclear fuel in its core and sheds its outer layers into space. Just a profoundly dense core, called a white dwarf, remains. Its radiation lights up the surrounding cosmic cloud, or nebula, helping to create the majestic type of scene in NGC 1514. Planetary nebula are often spherical, but not so for NGC 1514, located 1,500 light-years from Earth. It has somewhat of a crushed hourglass shape, with two prominent rings. "When this star was at its peak of losing material, the companion could have gotten very, very close," David Jones, an astronomer at the Institute of Astrophysics on the Canary Islands,…