This cosmic object is eerie and beautiful and cool and, to be brutally honest, I NEVER would've been able to figure out what created it.

Turns out, it's stellar cannibalism. A star ate another star, and then let out a milliennium-long belch. https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/what-created-this-eerie-blue-eye-in-space-stellar-cannibalism

2/ <ELF voice> Did you HEAR that?

3/ I *love* this whole thing. The Blue Ring Nebula was 1st seen 16 years ago by an ultraviolet observatory called GALEX. The object was a complete mystery for a long time. Then very deep images showed those pink/red loops, and that was the clue needed to unlock its secrets.

4/ *It's not a ring*. That's an illusion. The whole structure is, bizarrely, two conical shells connected at their apexes, like a tornado siren. We are looking down the axis of the structure, and where we see the two cones overlap it looks like a ring.

5/ This video might help. It rotates the whole structure so you can see it from Earth as well as from the side, then ends with it fading into the actual observation.

6/ An aside: As you watch the video it may look like the two cones suddenly switch directions and rotate *toward* each other. That's a powerful illusion because our brains aren't getting the right cues to see it rotate as a single rigid object.

7/ It's similar to an illusion I demonstarte in this short video, which I made a few years back. Trust me: This is extremely cool.

8/ Anyway the cones in the nebula were blown out when a star much like the Sun started to die, expanded, and consumed a very closely orbiting red dwarfcompanion. The details of how this happened are in my article linked in the OP. But seeing this structure is extremely rare…