The galaxy is studded with thousands of these jewe

The other option was that most planetary nebulae are formed not by one star, but by a pair of stars – what Orsola De Marco, an astronomer at Macquarie University in Sydney, named the "binary hypothesis". In this scenario, the second star is much smaller and thousands of times fainter than the red giant, and it might be as far away as Jupiter is from the Sun. That would allow it to disrupt the red giant while being distant enough to not be swallowed up. (Other possibilities also exist, such as a dive-bombing orbit in which the second star would approach the red giant every few hundred years, peeling off layers from it.)