A brand new picture, transmitted on 6 February 2007 by Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 displays the planetary nebula NGC 2440 and the opportunity to admire the chaotic structure of the death of a star.

The recent image of the Hubble reveals the last colorful representation of a star just like our Sun in its last moments.

After the star suffered a super nova explosion at the end of its life, it spitted off its outer layers of gas, which made a cocoon around the star's remaining matter and the ultraviolet light from the dying star, called dwarf white, reflects the material glow while the burned-out dead star is like a white dot in the center.

This is the faith that one day, over 5 billion years, our Sun will eventually share and it will wrap itself in stellar debris.

The Milky Way Galaxy, to which the Sun System belongs, is punctuated with such stellar relics, named planetary nebulae, but do not be fooled, these space bodies have nothing to do with planets.

During the XVIIIth and XX th centuries, the astronomers named them this way because when they looked at them using small telescopes, these objects were very similar to the disks of the remote planets Uranus and Neptune.

The planetary nebula caught by the Hubble's Camera is named NGC 2440.

The white dwarf of NGC 2440 is one of the hottest discovered till now, with an outer temperature surpassing 200 000 degrees Celsius.

The nebula's jumbled structure shows that this star spitted out its mass episodically in every direction, and each outburst in a different one. This activity can be seen in the two bowtie-shaped lobes. There are also many dust clouds, and some of these clouds form long, dark streaks pointing away from the star.

This nebula is situated roughly 4 000 light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Puppis.

The material coming from the dead star shines in many colors linked to its composition, its density and distance from the hot central star. From example, blue means it's helium; blue-green oxygen, and red nitrogen and hydrogen.

Photo credit: ESA