New image captures glowing shock waves in the Helix Nebula

Astronomers have created a spectacular composite image of a dying star’s remains in the act of being recycled.

The image shows the Helix Nebula, a bright ring of gas that is located 650 light-years from Earth in the constellation Aquarius.

Resembling a giant human eye, its familiar ring formed from material expelled by a star near the end of its life. The remnant of that star, a white dwarf, lies at the nebula’s centre.

Astronomers trained the Modular Optical Telephoto Hyperspectral Robotic Array (MOTHRA) on the nebula while it was still being constructed at the El Sauce Observatory in Chile’s Coquimbo Region.

When complete later this year, MOTHRA will use 1,140 high-end telephoto lenses and filters that function as a giant 4.8-m aperture refractor telescope to detect the extremely faint glow of gas across large swaths of the sky.

In the image above, the MOTHRA data is shown in black and was taken in November 2025 using 190 or so lenses. It has been combined with previous observations made by the Hubble Space Telescope and the Kitt Peak 4m telescope, which are shown in colour.

The MOTHRA data revealed a collection of 22 complete or partial arc-shaped glowing shock waves on the eastern side of the nebula.

Dubbed bow shocks, the waves resemble those that form in front of a boat moving through water. In the Helix Nebula, mostly invisible clumps of stellar debris dart rapidly through the thin gas among stars. The glowing bow shocks mark where those clumps collided with the surrounding gas.

By studying the image, astronomers traced the star’s debris as it is stripped, broken apart and gradually mixed into interstellar space.

“We are seeing material shed near the end of a star’s life being broken apart and returned to the galaxy,” notes Yale University astronomer Pieter van Dokkum, who led the study. “That handoff — from recognizable stellar debris to the diffuse gas between the stars — has been very difficult to observe.”