Blue represents hotter regions of the nebulae and red, cooler. Nebulas in the new images lie about 168,000 light-years from Earth, in a relatively nearby galaxy. It carries all the implications of possible evolving stars in a different galaxy. Composite detail of four of the planetary nebulas from the Large Magellenic Cloud. One such implication is the formation of life.
Planetary nebulas are the biggest carbon-producing objects in the sky.
That s because stars that end up as planetary nebulas go through nuclear reactions that produce carbon, the building block of life as we know it. As a star dies it ejects its carbon, which eventually becomes one of the fundamental building blocks of future stars and, possibly, also could form planets and life. That would be a possible seed for the next generation of stars. Asymmetric, or bipolar nebulas, for example, were found to be several times more massive than our sun. These nebulas are also relatively poor in carbon content compared to symmetric nebulas.