A dying star has a wheezing cough blew a gas shell looks like a big blue football, scientists say.

The discovery could shed new design planetary nebulae, the name comes from the 18 th century, astronomers using telescopes already thought that the stars the clouds of gas-giant planets.

Matthias Kronberger found amateur soccer-ball Nebula, named Kronberger 61 January 2011, after carefully studying the images digitized sky survey in 1980. When he warns professional astronomers, Gemini Observatory in Hawaii, magnified in the region to create a new color-composite image.

Kronberger 61 is located about 13,000 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus, and is almost perfectly round, a joke in comparison to other 3000 or so planetary nebulae have already been found.

"Very little of this area. They are usually elongated and resemble butterflies and other objects," said astronomer George Jacoby of the giant telescope of the Organization of Magellan, in Pasadena, California, which contributed to the image of nebula with Gemini.

When a star like the sun most of the fuses its hydrogen into helium and then helium into carbon, the star becomes unstable and blows into a red giant.

The hot core collapses and begins to vibrate, possibly pay their outer layers of gas to prepare the ground for the birth of a planetary nebula. When the core is exposed, its radiation heats the expelled gas, making it shine.

Looking for a kick-Ball Nebula Telltale Heart Beat

As the fog planets can form such complex structures, however, is a popular topic among professional astronomers, as Jacoby.

A camp was suspicious of a dying star requires that the severity and / or magnetic "interference" from a partner star may be close to another star or large planet, creating a planetary nebula complex form.

Another camp believes that the complex forms, like the butterfly as clouds can be formed without the help of close companions.

"If [Kronberger 61], we find years from now", when NASA's Kepler planet-finding space telescope is ready to set a hot star at the center of the nebula, Jacoby says.

If a star appears to brighten and dim periodically during the year, it is likely that a large orbiting companion helped to form a ball-like seams. Mean that the illuminating light-up side of the object orbiting the earth is facing, such as when the sun reflects the moon. Wash-out in turn could mean an object passes in front of a star, or that the companion (and the lit side) passes behind the star.

Our own Sun may or may not blow and informed as Kronberger 61, when it starts to die in about five billion years.

"The sun is about to be able to do that. It's not quite massive enough, "said Jacboy." I think it will have problems. "

Nebula Balls results were presented Monday at an international symposium of the International Astronomical Union in Puerto de la Cruz, Spain.