pretty colors

Congrats to Mas Sumbramanian and his team out at Oregon State University for the discovery! He said the following in an official OSU press release:

"It was serendipity, actually; a happy, accidental discovery.

The basic crystal structure we’re using for these pigments was known before, but no one had ever considered using it for any commercial purpose, including pigments.

Ever since the early Egyptians developed some of the first blue pigments, the pigment industry has been struggling to address problems with safety, toxicity and durability."

The Hubble Space Telescope took this image of a star that looks like it's inside a blue bubble. NASA says the blue bubble is actually a nebula formed around 20,000 years ago. This is how it's described on the Hubble's website:

The distinctive blue bubble appearing to encircle WR 31a is a Wolf–Rayet nebula — an interstellar cloud of dust, hydrogen, helium and other gases. Created when speedy stellar winds interact with the outer layers of hydrogen ejected by Wolf–Rayet stars, these nebulae are frequently ring-shaped or spherical.

According to NASA, these type of stars don't last very long (in terms of bodies in space at least). It'll only be around for a "few hundred thousand years".

This 1000-pound shell exploded at an altitude of 2600 feet. And the rest of the show isn't so bad either!