What does it look like when a star dies?
“Planetary nebulas were once thought to be simple, round objects with a single dying star at the center. They were named for their fuzzy, planet-like appearance through small telescopes,” Robert Wesson from Cardiff University said in a. “Only a few thousand years ago, that star was still a red giant that was shedding most of its mass. As a last farewell, the hot core now ionizes, or heats up, this expelled gas, and the nebula responds with colorful emission of light.
The nebula is about 2,500 light-years away from Earth, which when considering the vastness of space, is relatively close,said. It can be seen with only a pair of binoculars on a clear summer night. The images showed the details of a “filament structure of the inner ring,” as seen by the NIRCam, or Near-InfraRed Camera, thesaid, while the MIRI, or Mid-InfraRed Instrument, showed “details in the concentric features in the outer regions of the nublae’s ring.
“Our MIRI images provided us with the sharpest and clearest view yet of the faint molecular halo outside the bright ring. A surprising revelation was the presence of up to ten regularly-spaced, concentric features within this faint halo. These arcs must have formed about every 280 years as the central star was shedding its outer layers,”“When a single star evolves into a planetary nebula, there is no process that we know of that has that kind of time period.
There are also about 20,000 dense globules containing molecular hydrogen, each of which is about the size of Earth,called it a distorted doughnut from the viewpoint of one of the poles with the “brightly coloured barrel of material stretching away from us.” And while the center may look empty, it isn’t. Instead, it is packed with lower-density materials.
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James Webb Space Telescope offers a mesmerizing look at the Ring Nebula (photos)Monisha Ravisetti is Space.com's Astronomy Editor. She covers black holes, star explosions, gravitational waves, exoplanet discoveries and other enigmas hidden across the fabric of space and time. Previously, she was a science writer at CNET, and before that, reported for The Academic Times. Prior to becoming a writer, she was an immunology researcher at Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York. She graduated from New York University in 2018 with a B.A. in philosophy, physics and chemistry. She spends too much time playing online chess. Her favorite planet is Earth.
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