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The helix nebula, one of the closest to our planet, is 650 light years away from us, located in the constellation Aquarius. It is shaped like a prolate spheroid, which looks sort of like a football, and it is about 200 light years across. The expansion of the Nebula’s inner disk is estimated to have occured within the past 12,100 years, spectroscopically at a rate of 32 km/s, and its outer disk within the past 6,560 years at a rate of 40 km/s.

The Helix Nebula is the first nebula discovered that contains knots. Cometary knots, or globules, are a feature of evolution found in planetary nebulas, and are strands of molecular hydrogen. Not much about their origin is known, but they are about the size of our solar system, and the Helix Nebula contains about 40,000 of them. When observed with binoculars, the nebula is seen as a hazy, greenish cloud. The ring shape can only be seen with larger telescopes, and the radial streaks can only be seen using large ground-based telescopes.

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A planetary nebula is an expanding shell of ionized gas ejected from a red giant star. This phenomena is created when a star much like our sun reaches the end of its life. When its fuel, hydrogen, runs out, it turns to helium, which will eventually also become exhausted, and leave behind a white dwarf, which is about the size of Earth, but weighs the same amount that the original star once did. The intense ultraviolet radiation of the white dwarf heats up the layers of gas surrounding it, which shine brightly in infrared, and creates a Nebula.

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A nebula is a cloud of ionized gases, such as hydrogen and helium, in space. Some nebulae are formed at the end of a star’s life and others at the beginning. Stars are formed in nebulae when the dusts and gases are pulled together by gravity to form clumps. As the clumps get larger, they gain gravity and eventually collapse in on themselves. This makes them heat up and create a star. Nebulae that create stars are called star nurseries.

Most Nebulae are very large and can be hundreds of light years long. Though they seem so, they are not very dense. A cloud the size of Earth would only weigh a few kilograms. There are four types of nebulae; planetary, reflection, absorption, and emission. Reflection nebulae are nebulae that reflect nearby stars, while emission nebulae emit their own light in wavelengths. Absorption nebulae are nebulae so dense that they obscure light from objects behind it such as stars and other nebulae.