The engine powering the Wizard Nebula is binary star system called DH Cephei. These are two stars orbiting each other, although through my telescope I can’t resolve them as individuals so in my image they just look like one bright star.

These sibling stars are only two million years old, which is babies in stellar terms. It takes them just over two days to complete one orbit around their common centre of mass, which is an indication they must be incredibly close.

These two stars are both many hundreds of times bigger than our Sun, and with surface temperatures around 44,000 K they’re a lot hotter too! In fact, they’re so hot that they’re emitting huge amounts of ultraviolet radiation, which is ionising (stripping electrons) from surrounding hydrogen gas and making it glow. They’re also blasting out streams of charged particles, called stellar winds, which are sculpting the surrounding nebulosity. The radiation and stellar winds are compressing the gas and triggering new stars to form.

A bonus science fact about the DH Cephei system is that it’s producing lots of x-rays, likely due to the stars’ stellar winds, which are blasting out at thousands of kilometres per second, colliding with each other and generating so much heat that x-rays are emitted. This is a very rare occurrence, and is only happening here because lots of unusual conditions are being met: a binary system of hot O-type stars, very close together, emitting intense and dense stellar winds that are colliding.