 This nebula, nicknamed the Southern Crab, is located in the Southern Hemisphere 7,000 light years from Earth. It has two stars at the center, an aging red giant star and a white dwarf. The red giant is shedding its outer layers. Some of this ejected material is attracted by the gravity of the companion white dwarf. The result is that both stars are embedded in a flat disk of gas stretching between them. This belt of material constricts the flow of gas so that it only speeds away above and below the disk. The result is an hourglass shaped nebula. The bubbles of gas and dust appear brighter at the edges, giving an illusion of a crab leg structure. These legs are likely to be the places where the outflow slams into surrounding interstellar gas and dust, or possibly material that was lost earlier by the red giant star. The outflow may only last a few thousand years, a tiny fraction of the lifetime of the system. This means that the outer structures may be just thousands of years old, but the inner hourglass must be much more recent than that. The red giant will ultimately collapse to become a white dwarf. After that, the surviving pair of white dwarfs will illuminate a shell of gas we know as a planetary nebula.