The James Webb Space Telescope has revealed colorful new portraits of the iconic Ring Nebula.
James Webb's space Telescope has revealed a new color portrait of the iconic Ring Nebula.
These new images capture intricate details of a planetary nebula, a vast cosmic cloud of gas and dust that holds the remains of a dying star. Both images were taken using the space observatory’s instruments at different wavelengths of infrared light (invisible to the human eye). Webb has previously photographed the Ring Nebula from different perspectives, as well as the southern Ring Nebula, which looks similar. The Ring Nebula has long been a favorite of astronomers, having been studied for years due to its observability and the insight it can provide into the lifetime of stars. It is more than 2,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Lyra but can be seen by skywatchers using binoculars on clear summer nights. Although the name has nothing to do with planets, planetary nebulae typically have circular structures, so named because they originally resembled the planetary disks first discovered by French astronomer Charles Messier in 1764.
In 1779, Messier and the astronomer Darkier de Pelpois discovered the Ring Nebula. Some nebulae are places where stars are born. The Ring Nebula forms when a dying star (called a white dwarf) begins to eject its outer layers into space, creating a glowing ring and an expanding cloud of gas. Astronomer Roger Wesson of Cardiff University wrote in a NASA blog post about Webb’s latest observations: “Having said goodbye to the end, the hot core is now ionizing, or heating, the escaping gas as the nebula reacts with colored light.” The Ring Nebula.
“This raises the question: How do spherical stars produce such complex and subtle non-spherical structures?”
The mystery of the arc nebula
Wesson and his international team at ESSENcE (which stands for Evolving Stars and Nebulae in the JWST Era) used the Webb Infrared Camera and the Mid-Infrared Instrument to capture unprecedented detail that could help them learn more about the evolution of planetary nebulae over time. “The nebula’s bright ring structure consists of about 20,000 clusters of dense molecular hydrogen gas, each as massive as Earth,” Wesson wrote. The outer part of the ring shows sharp features pointing away from the dying star, which glows in infrared light but was only faintly visible in previous Hubble Space Telescope images.
The team believes these spikes come from molecules forming in the ring’s dense shadow.
Images taken by the Mid-Infrared Instrument, also known as MIRI, provide a clear, sharp image of the faint halo outside the ring. “A surprising discovery was the presence of as many as ten regularly spaced concentric features in this faint halo,” Wesson wrote.
Initially, the team believed that the observed arcs formed as the central star shed its outer layers over time. But because of Webb’s sensitivity, scientists now believe that the arcs in the halo may have other causes.
“When a star evolves into a planetary nebula, as far as we know, there is no such timescale for such a process,” Wesson wrote. “Instead, these halos indicate that the system must have a star orbiting as far from the central star as Pluto is from the Sun. The star’s companion star formed an outflow and formed the dying star as it released its atmosphere.”
