Dying Star Glows Like Crystal Ball in Stunning Telescope Image

From the summit of Mauna Kea, humanity's instruments have turned toward a quiet corner of the cosmos and found something that looks less like destruction than like wonder — a dying star, 1,500 light-years away, shedding its outer layers into a luminous sphere astronomers have named the Crystal Ball Nebula. The image, released by NOIRLab, captures the final act of a star once larger than our sun, its exposed core now burning at tens of thousands of degrees and illuminating the gas it has cast off into the dark. What we are witnessing is not an ending so much as a transformation — the universe,