Free Astronomy Magazine September-October 2015

31 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2015 SPACE CHRONICLES fuel. It will then become a tiny — but hot and very dense — white dwarf that will slowly cool over billions of years. The Sun will produce a planetary nebula several billion years in the future and will afterwards also spend its twilight years as a white dwarf. Planetary nebulae play a crucial role in the chemical enrichment and evolution of the Universe. Elements such as car- bon and nitrogen, as well as some other heavier elements, are created in these stars and re- turned to the interstellar me- dium. Out of this material new stars, planets and eventually life can form. Hence astronomer Carl Sagan's famous phrase: "We are made of star stuff." This picture comes from the ESO Cosmic Gems programme, an outreach initiative to produce images of interesting, intriguing or visual- ly attractive objects using ESO telescopes for the purposes of education and public outreach. The programme makes use of te- lescope time that cannot be used for science observations. All data collected may also be suitable for scientific purposes, and are made available to astronomers through ESO's science archive. T his extraordinary bubble, glowing like the ghost of a star in the haunting dark- ness of space, may appear supernatural and mysterious, but it is a familiar astronom- ical object: a planetary neb- ula, the remnants of a dying star. This is the best view of the little-known object ESO 378-1 yet obtained and was captured by ESO’s Very Large Telescope in northern Chile. [ESO] n