The Southern Ring Nebula looks as though a bomb dropped into an ocean, tsunami waves surging away, into the darkness. Cosmic light, presented in the colors of a lapis stone, seems to fill a gaping crater in space. For fatalists the world over, gazing into this planetary nebula some 2,500 light-years away may not have inspired celebratory feelings — rather, a foreboding of what’s to come. It’s easy to internalize the story of the Southern Ring Nebula as the sun’s own destiny — written in, well, the stars.
