You can see it change in brightness with just binoculars over the course of a year. Variable star R Aquarii is actually an interacting binary star system, two stars that seem to have a close, symbiotic relationship.

About 710 light years away, this intriguing system consists of a red giant star and dense white dwarf star in mutual orbit around their common center of mass.

The binary system’s visible light is dominated by the red giant, itself a Mira-type long period variable star. But material in the giant star’s extended envelope is pulled by gravity onto the surface of the smaller, denser white dwarf, eventually triggering a thermonuclear explosion and blasting material into space.

The featured image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows the still-expanding ring of debris which spans less than a light year and originated from a blast that would have been seen in the early 1770s.

The evolution of less understood energetic events producing high energy emission in the R Aquarii system has been monitored since 2000 using Chandra X-ray Observatory data.

Image Credit: Hubble, NASA, ESA; Processing & License: Judy Schmidt