This three panel view shows Hubble’s optical views of the Ring Nebula (L), SMA’s view of the carbon monoxide in the Ring Nebula (mid), and the location of the neutral CO, in contours, versus JWST observations of various other features, like neutral H2 and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (R). (Credit: NASA/ESA/O’Dell/Ferland/Henney/Peimbert/Thompson; SMA image and SMA/JWST image overlay: Joel Kastner/RIT)
The Ring Nebula, a bright, circular planetary nebula, is created by a dying Sun-like star. After centuries, we finally know its true shape.
Back in 1779, a highly unusual object was spotted.
The Ring Nebula can be found just inside the Summer Triangle in the constellation of Lyra: just south of the brightest star, Vega. Found in between the 2nd and 3rd brightest stars in Lyra’s constellation, the imaginary line connecting the blue giant stars Sheliak and Sulafat contains the Ring Nebula, circled in red, which can be spotted even with a pair of off-the-shelf binoculars. (Credit: NASA, ESA, Digitized Sky Survey 2)
The above view has been accessible to humanity for nearly 250 years: an object, about the size of Jupiter, with a bright circular annulus gradually faintening towards the outside and inside, but with a bright central point within it. This is the Ring Nebula, or Messier 57 (M57), discovered in 1779. (Credit: Mike Reid of Mike’s Astro)
Its once-uncertain origin is now known: a planetary nebula.
When our Sun runs out of fuel, it will become a red giant, followed by a planetary nebula with a white dwarf at the center. The Cat’s Eye Nebula is a visually spectacular example of this potential fate, with the intricate, layered, asymmetrical shape of this particular one suggesting a binary companion. At the center, a young white dwarf heats up as it contracts, reaching temperatures tens of thousands of Kelvin hotter than the surface of the red giant that spawned it. The hottest young white dwarf surfaces reach ~150,000 K. (Credit: Nordic Optical Telescope and Romano Corradi (Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes, Spain))
The end-state of many Sun-like stars, its blown-off gas gets heated by the hot, central stellar remnant.
Outside of the main features seen in the ring nebula, thin, wispy, outermore populations of gas, mostly hydrogen gas, are revealed by the Large Binocular Telescope at Mount Graham International Observatory. By combining data from multiple observatories, composite images revealing unprecedented features can be constructed. (Credit: NASA, ESA, C. Robert O’Dell (Vanderbilt University), and David Thompson (LBTO))
