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The James Webb Space Telescope has unveiled a colorful new portrait of the iconic Ring Nebula.
These new images capture the complex detail of planetary nebulae, huge clouds of cosmic gas and dust that are home to the remnants of dying stars.
The two images were taken in different wavelengths of infrared light, which is invisible to the human eye, using instruments at the space observatory. Webb previously captured a different perspective on the Ring Nebula, as well as the similar-looking Southern Ring Nebula.
The Ring Nebula, a long-time favorite of astronomers, has been studied for years for its observational capabilities and the insights it can provide about the lifetimes of stars. It’s in the constellation Lyra, which is more than 2,000 light years from Earth, but on clear nights during the summer, sky watchers with binoculars can see it.
Planetary nebulae, which have nothing to do with planets despite their name, usually have a spherical structure and are so named because they originally resembled the disks from which planets formed when the French astronomer Charles Messier discovered them for the first time in 1764.
Messier and astronomer Darquier de Pellepoix discovered the Ring Nebula 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 into space, creating a glowing ring and expanding cloud of gas.
“As a final farewell, the hot core now ionizes, or heats up, the ejected gas, and the nebula responds with colorful emission of light,” wrote Roger Wesson, astronomer at Cardiff University, in a NASA blog post about Webb’s latest observations. from the Ring Nebula. “This begs the question: how did a spherical star create such complex and delicate non-spherical structures?”
Mystery arc nebula
Wesson and his international team called ESSENcE, which stands for Evolved StarS and their Nebula in the JWST Era, used the Webb’s Near Infrared Camera and Middle Infrared Instrument to capture unprecedented details that can help them understand more about how planetary nebulae evolve. from time to time. .
“The iconic bright structure of the ring nebula is made up of about 20,000 dense plumes of molecular hydrogen gas, each as large as Earth,” Wesson wrote. Outside the ring is a prominent spiky feature that points away from the dying star, which glows in infrared light but was only faintly visible in earlier images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.
The team believes the spikes come from molecules forming in the ring’s dense shadow.
Images taken with the Mid-Infrared Instrument, also called MIRI, provide a clear and sharp image of the dim halo outside the ring.
The Webb’s Mid-Infrared Instrument shows the hot inner region of the Ring Nebula, as well as the arc just beyond the outer edge of the main structure. – ESA/Webb/NASA/CSA
“The surprising revelation was the presence of up to ten regularly spaced 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 something else may be responsible for the arcs within the halo.
“When a star evolves into a planetary nebula, no process known to us has such a time period,” Wesson wrote. “On the contrary, these rings indicate that there must be a companion star in the system, orbiting at the same distance from the central star as Pluto is from our Sun. As the dying star sheds its atmosphere, the companion star shapes the outflow and sculpts it.”
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2023-08-29 21:41:18
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