The James Webb telescope reveals the mystery of a “nebula” surrounding a dying star

manage James Webb Space Telescope In one of his first discoveries made possible by his meticulous observational skills, he spotted two previously unseen stars in the Southern Ring Nebula, which surrounds a dying star.

This strange nebula is located in the Milky Way, about 2,000 light years from the solar system, it is a gigantic cloud of gas and dust produced by a star, as it expels part of its matter when it descends, and contains a lot of gas and little dust.

At the center of the nebula remains the heart of this star, which is called a “white dwarf”, and is a very hot and very small star that is difficult to see directly, but its presence can be guessed thanks to the orange rings that surround it, which are traces of the substance he vomited. It is assumed that the fate of our sun will be similar in a few billion years, as will the vast majority of stars.

And unlike the sun, which will set on its own, the “white dwarf” at the heart of the Southern Ring Nebula isn’t alone. It was known until now that it has a “companion” star, which is easier to spot than a “white dwarf” because it’s still in its infancy. This companion star is the one that appears brightest in the center of the dust disk in images taken by the James Webb telescope, which has been 1.5 million kilometers from Earth since last summer.

Does this ring a bell? 💍

Webb’s first images showed 2 stars, a dying star and its orbiting companion, in the Southern Ring Nebula. Webb scientists now think more hidden companions helped shape the gas and dust here, potentially a total of 5 stars! Moreover: https://t.co/ZJb27lru5L pic.twitter.com/w1I3DYxEdJ

— NASA Webb Telescope (@NASAWebb) December 8, 2022

However, this familiar stellar binary in the Milky Way did not provide a justification for the nebula’s “atypical” structure, as explained by Philippe Amram, of the Marseille Astrophysical Laboratory, who is one of the authors of the study published today, Thursday, in the journal “Nature Astronomy” and includes a detailed explanation of the latest telescope observations.

The researcher, affiliated with the National Center for Scientific Research, added that scientists have sought, since the discovery of the southern ring nebula by astronomer John Herschel in 1835, to know the reason for its “strange non-spherical shape “.

James Webb’s observations help to clarify this mystery, as the instruments of the telescope, which has infrared vision, a wavelength invisible to the human eye, have provided evidence of the presence of at least two other stars all inside the nebula.

These two discovered stars lie at the center of the nebula, which spans a diameter 1,500 times the distance from the Sun to Pluto. They are further away from the “white dwarf” than the companion star, but the four stars are usually close enough to each other to interact. Therefore, an “exchange of energy” takes place between these stars, which affects the structure of the nebula and explains its distinctive appearance, according to the astrophysicist.

And last February, the American agency “NASA” for space science released the first images taken by the “James Webb” telescope, almost two months after its official launch.

The Carina Nebula is one of the first targets of the James Webb Space Telescope.
Moreover: https://t.co/1Gzj5hYTK5 pic.twitter.com/YiefspFUvF

— Black hole (@konstructivizm) December 7, 2022