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(Giclée Print)
This breath taking live image from space has been reproduced on canvas as living celestial art to decorate the walls of your home, office, or give as an inspirational gift. It is printed on high quality canvas and is shipped to you rolled up in a canister to minimize the cost of shipping and damage. To have it framed in a frame of your chose, simply take it to your local frame shop.

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A bunch of rowdy comets are colliding and kicking up dust around a dead star, according to new observations from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. The dead star lies at the center of the much-photographed Helix nebula, a shimmering cloud of gas with an eerie resemblance to a giant eye. “We were surprised to see so much dust around this star,” said a doctor at the University of Arizona, Tucson, and lead author of a paper on the results appearing in the March 1 issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters. “The dust must be coming from comets that survived the death of their sun.”

Spitzer’s spectacular new view of the Helix nebula shows colors as seen in infrared. The dusty dead star appears as a dot in the middle of the nebula, like a red pupil in a green monster’s eye. The Helix nebula, located about 700 light-years away in the constellation Aquarius, was formed when a star much like our Sun died and sloughed off its skin, or outer layers. Radiation from the dead star’s hot core, called a “white dwarf,” heats the expelled material, causing it to fluoresce with vivid colors. This cosmic beauty, termed a “planetary nebula,” won’t last long. In about 10,000 years, its shiny clouds will fade, leaving the white dwarf and its circling comets to cool down alone in empty space.

Astronomers have long studied the white dwarf at the center of the Helix nebula, but nobody had detected any dust close to it until now. Spitzer, an infrared space based observatory, was able to pick up the glow of a dusty disk circling around the stellar corpse at a distance of about 35 to 150 astronomical units (an astronomical unit is the distance between our Sun and Earth, which is 150 million kilometers or 93 million miles).

At first, the astronomers were shocked to see the dust. They said that when the star died, expelling its outer layers, dust in the system should have been blown away. The team then obtained more detailed data, which again pointed to the presence of a dusty disk. Where is the dust coming from? According to the astronomers, it is most likely being freshly churned up by comets smashing into each other in the outer fringes of the white dwarf ’s system. A few million years ago, before the white dwarf formed, when it was still a lively star like our Sun, its comets and possibly planets would have been in stable orbits, harmoniously traveling around the star. But when the star died, any inner planets would have burned up or been swallowed as the star expanded. Outer planets, asteroids, and comets would have been jostled about and thrown into each other’s paths.