Marvel at the strange shapes of nebulae

Many nebulae in the universe have very interesting names, such as "Ring of Fire" or "Chicken Run", while some nebulae are shaped like horse heads, roses or balls.

The "arm" in the image is like an image on an X-ray film, but in reality it is a cloud of matter released from a star that just exploded.NuSTAR, an unmanned spacecraft of the US Aeronautics Agency (NASA), photographed the cloud with an X-ray camera.Photo: NASA

Thanks to the Great Telescope of the Southern European Observatory in Chile, astronomers captured the beautiful image of the Abell 33 nebula in April 2014.(Photo: ESO)

Flaming Star is the name of a nebula in an infrared image taken by the WISE space telescope.(Photo: NASA)

Rosette (or NGC 2237) is the name of a red rose-like nebula about 5,000 light-years from Earth.(Photo: Brian Davis)

Kronberger 61, the name of the nebula shaped like a ball, surrounds a blue star.(Photo: NASA)

Running Chicken is a cloud of dust, a giant gas that surrounds the multitude of new stars formed in the constellation Centaurus.It is about 6,500 light-years from Earth.(Photo: NASA)

"Pink bud" is the astronomical name called a nebula in the image taken by the WISE telescope with an infrared camera.(Photo: NASA)

Light from the nebula IC 434 next to the gas and dust of the Horsehead (horse-shaped nebula), creating a pink space.(Photo: NASA)

Tarantula (Giant Spider) is the name of a nebula in the Large Megallic Cloud, a galaxy near the Milky Way.(Photo: NASA)

The "fire ring" in the picture is a cloud of gas dust captured by the Spitzer space telescope.(Photo: NASA)