About 2,500 light-years away are the remnants of a dying star in the shape of a ring, forming a nebula with the same name – and now, new photos from the James Webb Telescope allow us to see it in more detail.
The Ring Nebula, also called NGC 6720 and Messier 57, is a gaseous cloud that contains 20,000 dense clumps rich in molecular hydrogen. Its images come to us in fantastic colors: it is reddish at the edges (due to nitrogen, sulfur, and hydrogen), green and blue closer to the center (hydrogen and ionized oxygen), and the blue color in the center radiates from ionized helium.
The first image was taken with the NIRCam (Near InfraRed Camera), which is designed to detect light in the near infrared spectrum and can produce extremely detailed images. (NIRCam also made an equally hypnotizing updated image of the Pillars of Creation).
Meanwhile, the second image was taken with MIRI, the Webb Telescope’s mid-infrared instrument, which better illuminates the (approximately) ten concentric arcs of the nebula beyond its outer edge, which were likely formed as a result of the interaction of its central star with a lower-mass satellite in its orbit.
“Such nebulae reveal a kind of astronomical archeology, as astronomers study the nebula to learn about the star that created it,” the European Space Agency wrote in a press release.
The Ring Nebula was accidentally discovered in 1779 by French astronomers Charles Messier and Antoine Darkier de Pelpoy while searching for comets, mistaking it for distant worlds. The nebula was formed from a medium-sized star that shed its outer layers when it exhausted its fuel and approached the moment of its death.
“The colorful main ring is made up of gas ejected by a dying star at the center of the nebula. It is on its way to becoming a white dwarf, a very small, dense and hot body that is the last stage of evolution for a star like the Sun,” ESA wrote.
- The James Webb telescope was launched into space in December 2021, and in mid-January 2022 it reached a working halo orbit around the second Lagrange point in the Sun-Earth system, and in July, after several months of instrument calibration and optics adjustment, it finally began its science program. The main advantage of the James Webb is the study of the infrared part of the spectrum, which allows us to examine older and colder objects.
- In September 2022, the telescope received images of the first exoplanet, HIP 65426b, and later saw the Stephen’s Quintet, the Southern Ring Nebula, the Keel Nebula, and the Pillars of Creation and collected data that will help astronomers determine the composition of the atmosphere of Mars and its surface; took the clearest photo of Neptune’s rings, and captured Jupiter with the aurora borealis; worked simultaneously with Hubble, filming the moment of the DART probe’s collision with an asteroid; showed galaxies that formed about 350 million years after the Big Bang, and also discovered a 10-kilometer-long water plume on Saturn’s moon Enceladus, saw the birth of a star in the constellation Virgo, and found the “oldest” supermassive black hole.
