SCIENCE LAB SPECIAL : COSMIC CONCLSION

HIGH in the mountains of Chile - the MOTHRA telescope may still be under construction but it is already offering a look at some of the universe's most hard-to-photograph processes.

It produced an image of the Helix Nebula, an example of the end of a star's life cycle.

MOTHRA is designed to capture images of large yet faint objects in our night sky - particularly the cosmic web of diffuse gases and dark matter that spans the distance between galaxies.

While testing 172 of the lenses installed so far, scientists saw something surprising. After turning the telescope toward the Helix Nebula, they saw faint bands of stellar debris dissolving into space around it.

The observation was described in a study in the journal Nature.

'' We were like : This is new. This is something that we've never seen before,'' said Peter Van Dokkum, a physicist at Yale University in Connecticut and an author of the new study.

The Helix Nebula, sometimes called the '' Eye of God '' because of its eye-like shape, shows what a star can look like at the end of its life cycle.

As a star runs out of hydrogen fuel in its core, it starts shedding outer layers. This excess material swirls around the star and is dissolved into the interstellar medium, which is the gas, dust and energy between the universe's stars.

!WOW! thanks K.R. Callaway.