The Ring Nebula’s halo (purple) with its gas-filled inside (green)
JWST/NIRcam
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has taken an astonishing new image of the Ring Nebula. This glowing, donut-shaped nebula has by no means been seen in such intricate element earlier than.
The Ring Nebula is about 2600 gentle years away in the path of the constellation Lyra. It is what astronomers name a planetary nebula, which types when a dying star blows off its outer layers to create a shroud of gasoline and dirt.
By probability, this nebula occurs to be oriented in order that from Earth we view it face-on, with the stellar corpse in the centre circled by its titular ring of shiny nitrogen and sulfur. The entire factor is enveloped in a veil of oxygen gasoline, which provides it a greenish tinge when the star’s gentle passes by it.
“We are witnessing the final chapters of a star’s life, a preview of the sun’s distant future, so to speak,” mentioned Mike Barlow at University College London in a assertion. “We can use the Ring Nebula as our laboratory to study how planetary nebulae form and evolve.”
The inside workings of the Ring Nebula and others prefer it are terribly advanced, with dense knots of gasoline, wispy clouds, and gauzy bubbles, all interacting with each other in methods researchers don’t fully perceive. The new observations from JWST reveal the world close to the star in unprecedented element, which ought to make it simpler to determine what’s taking place there.
They additionally embrace details about the chemical make-up of the nebula. “We even found large carbonaceous molecules in this object, and we have no clear idea how they got there yet,” mentioned Els Peeters on the University of Western Ontario in Canada in a assertion. These molecules could also be proof that the chemical interactions occurring in planetary nebulae are simply as difficult because the bodily ones.
Topics:
- astronomy/
- James Webb house telescope