Planetary nebula's ear-like lobes reshape understanding of stellar evolution

In the quiet archive of cosmic time, a well-known planetary nebula has offered astronomers an unexpected confession: its death was not the clean, singular event long assumed, but a drawn-out series of violent exhalations. Researchers have identified ear-like lobes in the nebula's structure that resist the tidy explanations of existing models, suggesting that dying stars shed their outer layers in multiple, distinct episodes rather than one orderly farewell. This discovery, emerging from closer and more sensitive observation, invites a humbling reassessment — not only of this nebula, but of how