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Astronomers pointed the powerful James Webb Space Telescope at planetary nebula NGC 1514, where a star is shedding copious amounts of gas into the universe as it gradually exhausts its fuel and shrinks down into a dense core — a shell of its former self. The resulting cosmic clouds — named a "planetary nebula" only because through the first telescopes these distant and roundish objects looked like planets — can be brilliant spectacles, and NGC 1514 is no different.

"We’ve come a long way since, with Webb’s mid-infared view being the most detailed view of a planetary nebula to date," NASA posted online, in reference to NGC 1514.

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(The Webb telescope views space in infrared light, a spectrum that's invisible to the naked eye but cuts through the thick masses of clouds and gas that obstruct or limit our view of such far-off objects.)

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The image below shows a scene that has evolved over at least some 4,000 years, NASA explained. At the center of the gaseous structure are two stars tightly orbiting one another (a "binary star system), but from our distant view they appear as one vivid bright dot. Of the two stars, one is dying as it's spent the nuclear fuel in its core and sheds its outer layers into space. Just a profoundly dense core, called a white dwarf, remains. Its radiation lights up the surrounding cosmic cloud, or nebula, helping to create the majestic type of scene in NGC 1514.

Planetary nebula are often spherical, but not so for NGC 1514, located 1,500 light-years from Earth. It has somewhat of a crushed hourglass shape, with two prominent rings. "When this star was at its peak of losing material, the companion could have gotten very, very close," David Jones, an astronomer at the Institute of Astrophysics on the Canary Islands, said in a NASA statement. "That interaction can lead to shapes that you wouldn’t expect. Instead of producing a sphere, this interaction might have formed these rings."

The James Webb Space Telescope's detailed view of the planetary nebula NGC 1514. Credit: NASA / ESA / CSA / STScI / Michael Ressler (NASA-JPL) / Dave Jones (IAC) On left: A view of NGC 1514 captured by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) telescope in 2010. On right: The Webb telescope's view of NGC 1514. Credit: NASA / ESA / CSA / STScI / NASA-JPL / Caltech / UCLA / Michael Ressler (NASA-JPL) / Dave Jones (IAC)

The astronomers involved in this observation suspect the nebula's rings look "fuzzy" because they're composed of tiny grains of dust, and these particles are illuminated by ultraviolet light emitted by the nearby white dwarf.

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Astronomers have peered at NGC 1514 for hundreds of years, since the 18th century. It looked awfully fuzzy back then, and they failed to resolve it with telescopes of the age. But times, and technology, have changed.

"With Webb, our view is considerably clearer," NASA wrote.

The Webb telescope's powerful abilities

The Webb telescope — a scientific collaboration between NASA, ESA, and the Canadian Space Agency — is designed to peer into the deepest cosmos and reveal new insights about the early universe. It's also examining intriguing planets in our galaxy, along with the planets and moons in our solar system.

Here's how Webb is achieving unparalleled feats, and may for years to come:

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- Giant mirror: Webb's mirror, which captures light, is over 21 feet across. That's over two-and-a-half times larger than the Hubble Space Telescope's mirror, meaning Webb has six times the light-collecting area. Capturing more light allows Webb to see more distant, ancient objects. The telescope is peering at stars and galaxies that formed over 13 billion years ago, just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. "We're going to see the very first stars and galaxies that ever formed," Jean Creighton, an astronomer and the director of the Manfred Olson Planetarium at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, told Mashable in 2021.

- Infrared view: Unlike Hubble, which largely views light that's visible to us, Webb is primarily an infrared space telescope, meaning it views light in the infrared spectrum. This allows us to see far more of the universe. Infrared has longer wavelengths than visible light, so the light waves more efficiently slip through cosmic clouds; the light doesn't as often collide with and get scattered by these densely packed particles. Ultimately, Webb's infrared eyesight can penetrate places Hubble can't.

"It lifts the veil," said Creighton.

- Peering into distant exoplanets: The Webb telescope carries specialized equipment called spectrographsthat will revolutionize our understanding of these far-off worlds. The instruments can decipher what molecules (such as water, carbon dioxide, and methane) exist in the atmospheres of distant exoplanets — be they gas giants or smaller rocky worlds. Webb looks at exoplanets in the Milky Way galaxy. Who knows what we'll find?

"We might learn things we never thought about," Mercedes López-Morales, an exoplanet researcher and astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics-Harvard & Smithsonian, previously told Mashable.