Death throes

Astronomers once thought that an ordinary star such as our Sun would simply
blast gas randomly into space when it died. But this picture from the Hubble
Space Telescope of an exploded star known as the “ant nebula”, suggests a more
dramatic death. How does a spherical star produce such a non-spherical but
symmetrical shape? Perhaps it was spinning and twisted its magnetic field into
bizarre shapes, or it had a companion in a close orbit that shaped the gas as it
poured out. “This image is telling us how little we understand,” says Howard
Bond of the Space Telescope…