Southern Ring Nebula. The left image highlights the very hot gas and the right image highlights the stars.
Joseph DePasquale/STScI
The Southern Ring Nebula is full of stars. Once thought to be giant clouds of gas and debris in space, nebulae are formed from the death of a single star, but the plumes and swirls of these nebulae are caused by at least four stars orbiting each other. It is formed by doing, sometimes even five.
Orsola de Marco Doctors at Macquarie University in Australia used the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to observe this nebula, also known as NGC 3132, and created a 3-D model to elucidate its internal structure. “The ideal would be to find a companion star and rewind time. In reality, you can’t do that, so the nebula itself has to act like a crime scene investigator telling you what happened to the nebula.” says De Marco.
When a sun-sized star dies, its outer layer sheds away, leaving a star core in the middle that heats them up and makes them glow. Until these new images come out, we know there are two other her stars orbiting around the main star that formed the Southern Ring Nebula, one near and one far away. I knew
The JWST images revealed the presence of a dusty disk around the star. This must have been caused by an additional companion star orbiting even closer, a distance between the Earth and the Sun, than the stars we know. There are no indications of the star itself, so it is possible that it fell and merged with its primary star.
A series of arches that look like tree stump rings can also be seen on the nebula’s outer edge. From the distance between these rings, the researchers were able to calculate the distance between the host star and the star carved into the expanding gas cloud. This distance should be 40 to 60 times greater than the star that created the dust disk.
“Every time a ring like this forms, the only explanation that really works is that when the star molts, it has a companion star around it that leaves a mark on matter as it orbits.” De Marco says. “You need a companion to make the ring, but you can’t be the same companion that made the disc.”
Finally, a 3D model of the nebula revealed evidence of a possible fifth star. The reconstruction looks like a lumpy egg, with each bump paired with another on the opposite side of the gas cloud. These clumps are most likely formed by jets from the central star, but the only way to give them random orientation is to take advantage of the chaotic orbits of three nearby stars. deaf. This would require an additional star orbiting the primary star and a polar star that created the dust disk, making the Southern Ring a five-star star.
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- Performer/
- james webb space telescope
