How to Use planetary nebula in a Sentence

planetary nebula

noun
  • Even stars that are just a few percent less massive than the sun will not produce a planetary nebula.
    Jason Daley, Smithsonian, 9 May 2018
  • In one image of the Southern Ring planetary nebula, the shells of gas and dust ejected from dying stars like our sun, provide detail from the late stages of a star’s life.
    Camille Fine, USA TODAY, 12 July 2022
  • Though the phenomenon is called a planetary nebula, the term is a misnomer.
    Leslie Nemo, Scientific American, 15 Jan. 2021
  • This expanding cloud of gas, called a planetary nebula, is the result of a dying star that is blowing off its outer layers.
    Jake Parks, Discover Magazine, 11 July 2022
  • The leftovers of a star that went supernova are called planetary nebula.
    Jamie Carter, Forbes, 23 July 2022
  • The Southern Ring planetary nebula – an expanding cloud of gas surrounding a dying star - is 2,000 light-years away from Earth.
    Jamie Carter, Forbes, 9 July 2022
  • This large planetary nebula includes an expanding cloud of gas around a dying star.
    Ashley Strickland, CNN, 12 July 2022
  • Instead, a planetary nebula is formed when an older, massive star blasts off some of its outer layers, forming a ring of expanding gas.
    John Timmer, Ars Technica, 8 July 2022
  • Southern Ring Nebula: This is an example of a planetary nebula, which has nothing to do with planets.
    John Timmer, Ars Technica, 8 July 2022
  • It's long been known that most stars wind up producing a planetary nebula, but astronomers thought the sun — a ball of superheated gas with a diameter 109 times that of Earth — was too small to form a visible nebula.
    David Freeman /, NBC News, 10 May 2018
  • For decades, astronomers have sought the lightest noble gas molecule, helium hydride, in the planetary nebula NGC 7027, shown in this composite image.
    Ken Croswell, Discover Magazine, 12 Dec. 2019
  • Those intense stellar winds will eventually expel the atmosphere and stellar envelope, and the star will become a white dwarf star within a planetary nebula.
    Jennifer Ouellette, Ars Technica, 29 Mar. 2022
  • That’s the Stingray Nebula, considered the youngest planetary nebula—a title given to nebulae born of a dying star—which became visible late last century.
    National Geographic, 20 Mar. 2018
  • Famous examples of planetary nebula include: Ring Nebula (M57) in the constellation of Lyra.
    Jamie Carter, Forbes, 23 July 2022

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'planetary nebula.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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