In this page’s observatory, the nebula of the Personal category is the Helix. I chose it because it is what will happen to the Sun, and because Webb has just looked at it like no one before.
A Sun-like star, at the end
The Helix (NGC 7293) is a planetary nebula, a confusing name: it has nothing to do with planets. It is what remains when a star of roughly the Sun’s mass exhausts its hydrogen, swells into a red giant and sheds its outer layers in waves. The ejected gas drifts away and is lit by the ultraviolet radiation of the bare core left at the centre, a hot, tiny white dwarf that will cool for billions of years.
It lies about 650 light-years away, in Aquarius, and is one of the nearest planetary nebulae. That is why it looks so large: in the sky it spans about half the diameter of the full Moon, though you need a telescope and a dark sky to make it out.
The cometary knots
The strangest thing about the Helix is its cometary knots: thousands of dense gas globules, each the size of the solar system, with a bright head and a tail pointing outward, sculpted by the white dwarf’s radiation as if they were comets. Hubble photographed them for the first time in the nineties and they have been a laboratory ever since for understanding how dense gas survives inside hot gas.
On 20 January 2026 ESA/Webb released a near-infrared view of that region. Webb sees the dust and molecular hydrogen that are dark in visible light, so the knots appear with a structure Hubble could not show. That is the image this page uses, with its full credit in the panel.
Why it is the personal nebula
Because it is a story about time. The Helix shows what the Sun will do in about five billion years, and it does so with a geometric calm I find more moving than any explosion. The personal, for me, is that: the things done slowly that last.