Dying Star Sculpts Rungs of Gas and Dust

 

Science

One of the things that gives me, as a scientist, a deep feeling of satisfaction about the ingenuity of the human brain is when an observation of an object turns out to nicely agree with theoretical predictions:

That’s really why I am happy to be a scientist: To be able to exclusively deal with the question “how does it work?”, for whatever it is that I’m interested in. As an added bonus, in astrophysics, there’s no money ever to be made from posing and answering that question, and no harm to be done.