manage James Webb Space Telescopein one of his first discoveries made possible by his meticulous observational skills, observing two previously invisible stars in the Southern Ring Nebula surrounding a waning star.
This strange nebula is found in the Milky Way, about two thousand light years from the solar system, it is a gigantic cloud of gas and dust produced by a star that emits part of its matter when it descends, and contains a lot of gas and little dust.
At the center of the nebula remains the heart of this star, which is called a white dwarf, and is a very hot and very small star that is difficult to see directly, but its existence can be guessed thanks to the orange rings that surround it, which are traces of the substance it emitted. It is assumed that the fate of our sun will be similar in a few billion years, as will the vast majority of stars.
Remarks from @NASAWebb‘s Southern Ring Nebula, reveals the hidden stars that shape the nebula and reveals details of the size of the central star that created it. Find out more: https://t.co/wFLUwdz6W4 pic.twitter.com/qIPtCMZUlY
— NASA (@NASA) December 8, 2022
But unlike the sun, which will set by itself, the white dwarf at the heart of the Southern Ring Nebula isn’t alone. It was known until now that it has a “companion” star that is easier to spot than a white dwarf, because it is still in its infancy. This companion star is the one that appears brightest in the center of the dust disk in images taken by the James Webb telescope, which has been 1.5 million kilometers from Earth since last summer.
However, this familiar stellar binary in the Milky Way did not provide a justification for the nebula’s “atypical” structure, as explained by Philippe Amram, of the Marseille Astrophysical Laboratory, who is one of the authors of the study published Thursday in the journal Nature Astronomy, and includes a detailed explanation of the latest observations.
The researcher, affiliated with the National Center for Scientific Research, added that scientists have sought, since the discovery of the southern ring nebula by astronomer John Herschel in 1835, to know the reason for its “strange non-spherical shape “.
James Webb’s observations help to clarify this mystery, as his instruments, which have infrared vision, a wavelength invisible to the human eye, have provided evidence of the presence of at least two other stars in the inside the nebula.
These two discovered stars lie at the center of the nebula, which spans a diameter 1,500 times the distance from the Sun to Pluto. They are further away from the white dwarf than the companion star, but the four stars are usually close enough to each other to interact. Therefore, an “exchange of energy” takes place between these stars, which affects the structure of the nebula and explains its characteristic appearance, according to the astrophysicist.
(AFP)
