2,500 years ago one of the most beautiful features in space was born: the Southern Ring Nebula. The nebula was clearly imaged by the Webb Space Telescope earlier this year, and astronomers now think they know exactly how the star’s violent outburst happened, leaving the elegant nebula behind.
The star carrying the nebula was about three times the size of the Sun and 500 million years old. This is very small, as far as stars are concerned. Our Sun is about 4.6 billion years old I have to live on another 5 billion.
About 2500 years ago, Confucius and Buddha were still alive. The Peloponnesian Wars were about to begin. And somewhere in those intervening years, a star 2,000 light-years away expired, spewing gas outward from a newly formed white dwarf.
The Southern Ring Nebula star isn’t dead, not yet, but its gas ejection is a major turning point in the star’s life. White dwarfs are the stellar endgame. They form when stars run out of nuclear energy and start to slow down.
Thanks to images from the Webb Space Telescope and smart accounts and Mathematical modeling by the research teamNow you can see the moments before the Southern Ring Nebula starlight show It is examined in detail.
Various Webb filters stand out aspects of light source, and here’s why It may look like some parts of the nebula Pearlescent or translucent red while others appear blue or orange, depending on the imageAge. Spider web Choose image processors Highlight different aspects of things in order to display different elements – hot gas, For instanceor star factories within larger systems.
A team of 70 astronomers worked together to determine that as many as five stars (of which only two are now visible) may have been involved in the stars’ disappearance. Their investigation into the death of the star is published Today in Natural Astronomy.
“We were surprised to find evidence of two or three companion stars that may have hastened its demise, as well as another ‘innocent bystander’ star caught in the middle of the interaction,” said Ursula DiMarco, Macquarie University astronomer and of the authors of the study. Lead author at a university Publication.
The teamwork for the nebula’s origins was made possible by extremely precise measurements of the brightest star (the interstellar star, if you will) in Webb ipond Webb’s data allowed researchers to precisely measure his mass and how far along he was in his personal lifeThis, in turn, allowed him to to derive the mass of the faint central star before it loses its matter and creates the colored hue sodium
Webb imaged the southern ring with two instruments, NIRcam and MIRI. Webb’s images were complemented by data from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, the San Pedro de Martire Telescope, and NASA’s Gaia and Hubble Space Telescopes.
only two of The stars are believed to be involved in this cosmic outrage visible inside Spider web‘S Representative color shot from the nebula with NIRcam. The bright star at the nebula’s center collaborated with the star, which released so much material that it became a white dwarf. This fascinating (and debilitated) star is found faintly along the eight o’clock diffraction height from the bright center star in the photo above.
Astronomers believe that at least one star interacted with the fainter star (star 1 in the timeline shown). below) as the latter swelled, preparing to expel its gas and become a white dwarf.
According to the team, this mysterious star (star 3) spewed out jets of material as it interacted with the dying star and blanketed the faint star in dust before merging with the dwarf. Star 2 in the illustration is now the bright spot in the center of the nebula – a relatively strong character, given its lack of explosive activity or outgassing.
Another star (or “Partygoer”, in Analogy with the Space Telescope Science Institute An astrophysical error) kicked up the gas and dust released by its predecessor, causing undulating ripples in matter. Then another star (star 5 in the panels above) orbited the light show and produced the ring system surrounding the nebula.
According to the researchers’ estimates, the white dwarf near the nebula’s core can be considered the guest of the party who raged furiously and passed out before the end of the party. But the star made everyone enjoy doing it, and thanks to him, the party went ahead.
“We think all this gas and dust that we see everywhere must have come from that star, but companion stars have been throwing it in very specific directions,” said Joel Kastner, an astrophysicist at the Rochester Institute of Technology. In StScI Publication.
The researchers believe that the same methods that revealed the details of the Southern Ring Nebula’s birth could help decipher the birth of other nebulae, as well as the astrophysical forces at work in stellar interactions.
The images that revealed this interstellar landscape were released in June. Only now have the researchers had enough time to examine the data and offer their own interpretation.
Then, see the pictures i was you I saw From Spider web Like this distant—They all have their own stories, which will (hopefully) be told in detail soon.
More: Are the colors in the Webb telescope images “fake”?
