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The James Webb Space Telescope has revealed a new color image of the famous Ring Nebula.
These new images capture the intricate details of planetary nebulae, huge clouds of cosmic gas and dust that are home to the remnants of dying stars.
The two images were taken at different infrared wavelengths, which are invisible to the human eye, using the space observatory’s instruments. Webb previously captured different views of the Ring Nebula, as well as the similar South Ring Nebula.
The Ring Nebula, a longtime favorite of astronomers, has been studied for years for its observing abilities and the insights it can provide into stellar life. It’s in the constellation Lyra, more than 2,000 light years from Earth, but on clear summer nights sky watchers can see it with binoculars.
Planetary nebulae, which have nothing to do with planets despite their name, usually have a circular structure and are so named because they originally resembled the disks from which planets formed when they were first discovered by the French astronomer Charles Messier in 1764.
The Ring Nebula was discovered by Messier and astronomer Darquier de Bilibois in 1779.
Some nebulae are stellar nurseries from which stars are born. The Ring Nebula is created when a dying star, called a white dwarf, begins to shed its outer layers in space, creating a glowing ring and expanding cloud of gas.
“As a final farewell, this hot core ionizes or heats the ejected gas, and the nebula responds with colorful emission of light,” wrote Roger Wesson, astronomer at Cardiff University, in an article. Entry blog NASA About Webb’s recent observations of the Ring Nebula. “This begs the question: How could a spherical star create such a complex and intricate non-spherical structure?”
Called ESSENcE, which stands for Evolving Stars and Their Nebulae in the Age of the James Webb Space Telescope, Wesson and his team used a near-infrared webcam and mid-infrared instruments to capture unprecedented detail that could help them understand more about how planetary nebulae evolve over time. . .
“The nebula’s bright, circular structure is composed of about 20,000 dense globs of molecular hydrogen gas, each roughly equivalent to the mass of the earth,” Wesson wrote. Beyond the ring is a prominent spiky feature 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 the spikes are caused by particles forming in the ring’s dense shadow.
Images taken with the Mid-Infrared Instrument, also called MIRI, provide a sharp and clear image of the dim halo outside the ring.
“The surprising discovery was that there were ten regularly placed concentric features within this dim halo,” Wesson wrote.
Initially, the team thought the observed arcs were formed when the central star sheds its outer layers over time. But thanks to Webb’s sensitivity, scientists now believe that something else may be responsible for the arcing within the corona.
“When a star develops into a planetary nebula, no process that we know of has this time period,” Wesson wrote. Instead, these rings indicate that there must be a companion star in the system, orbiting farther from the central star as Pluto is from our sun. As a dying star sheds its atmosphere, the companion star shapes and forms its outflow.
2023-08-29 22:25:31
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