The Webb Space Telescope has acquired images of known ones Ring Nebulawith new data on the formation and evolution of these objects suggesting a key role for binary partners.
Like the Southern Ring Nebula, one of Webb’s earliest images, the Ring Nebula shows intricate structures from the final stages of a dying star.
Planetary nebulae were once thought to be simple, round objects with a single dying star at the center. They were named for their faint planet-like appearance through small telescopes, details Europe Press.
Just a few thousand years ago, that star was still a red giant that was losing most of its mass. In a final farewell, the hot core now ionizes or heats this expelled gas, and the nebula responds with a colorful emission of light.
However, modern observations show that most planetary nebulae exhibit staggering complexity. It begs the question: how does a globular star create such intricate and delicate non-spherical structures?
“When we first saw the images, we were amazed at the amount of detail they contained. The bright ring that gives the nebula its name is made up of some 20,000 individual clumps of dense molecular hydrogen gas, each as massive as Earth,” said Roger Wesson of Cardiff University and a researcher involved in this observation of the nebula. Webb.
The researcher said that within the ring there is a narrow emission band of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, “complex carbon-containing molecules that we do not expect to form in the ring nebula. Outside the bright ring are curious “spikes” pointing directly away from the central star, prominent in the infrared but only faintly visible in Hubble Space Telescope images. We think this may be due to molecules that can form in the shadows of the densest parts of the ring, where they are shielded from the direct and intense radiation of the hot central star.”
Images from the MIRI infrared instrument provided the sharpest, brightest image yet of the faint molecular halo outside the bright ring. A startling 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 while the central star was shedding its outer layers. When a single star becomes a planetary nebula, there is no process that has such a time period as far as we know.
Instead, these rings suggest there must be a companion star in the system, orbiting the same distance from the central star as Pluto does from our sun. As the dying star lost its atmosphere, the outflow was shaped and sculpted by the companion star.
Wesson explains that no previous telescope had the sensitivity and spatial resolution to detect this subtle effect.
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