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The Ring Nebula is among the most captured subjects in the nocturnal sky, the remains of a once sun-like star located approximately 2,000 light-years away from our planet. Its remarkable, smoke-ring-like shape has mesmerized and confused astronomers, who have long discussed whether this remnant actually adopts a ring form or if its appearance is simply a trick of our observational angle in space.
New examinations of the Ring Nebula have now mapped the movement of gas molecules along its periphery, enabling astronomers to delineate its structure with greater precision. The findings indicate that the remnant is shaped less like a flawless ring and more akin to a barrel, with our line of sight oriented right down its poles, as reported by Joel Kastner from the Rochester Institute of Technology during the 245th American Astronomical Society (AAS) press convention in Maryland on Tuesday (Jan. 14).
We are looking “directly down the barrel of it, which is really quite surprising to me — we’re just fortunate,” he remarked, adding that the discoveries provide fundamentally “a fresh perspective on an old astronomical acquaintance.”
These discoveries assist researchers in gaining a deeper comprehension of the mechanisms that shape intricate planetary nebulas, which, despite their designation, have no real association with planets. They are, in fact, the remnants of stars akin to our own that perished eons ago. The misnomer arose due to the planet-like look of these nebulas when observed by early astronomers using small telescopes.
“Planetary nebulae were once presumed to be uncomplicated, rounded entities with a single expiring star at the core,” astronomer Roger Wesson from Cardiff University stated in a prior declaration. “It raises the question: how does a spherical star create such elaborate and fragile non-spherical formations?”
In a bid to discover the answer, Kastner and his team employed the Submillimeter Array (SMA) — a collection of radio dishes stationed atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii — to capture high-definition images of the Ring Nebula last year.
In particular, they tracked the movements of carbon monoxide gas molecules that define the edges of the nebula. According to Kastner, monitoring the speeds and positions of those molecules, which were ejected by the dying, sun-like star that formed the nebula approximately 4,000 years ago, unveiled its 3D configuration in detail — a feature that telescopes, even powerful observatories like Hubble and James Webb, cannot ascertain from their flattened views.
Beyond assisting the researchers in solidifying the nebula’s ellipsoidal arrangement, the 3D representation also validated that the stellar remnant of the former star known as a white dwarf, represented as the small white point within the nebula, indeed lies at its core.
“That was not necessarily a given,” Kastner commented during the AAS press briefing. The white dwarf appears slightly off-center in numerous telescope visuals; this discrepancy, however, might be attributed to our perspective and the remnant’s slightly misaligned “poles,” rather than the position of the star itself, Kastner clarified.
Recent stunning images from the James Webb Space Telescope have revealed multiple concentric arcs just beyond the outer rim of the main ring, which seem to appear every 280 years.
However, there is no evident explanation for why this regularity occurs, prompting astronomers to suggest the existence of an invisible companion star likely orbits the central white dwarf. This hidden star, which astronomers predict should be at least as distant from the central star as Pluto is from the sun, would have shaped the material expelled by the dying star to create the extraordinarily intricate nebula we admire today.
Indeed, in the new observations, Kastner and his associates detected “holes” in the nebula, which they attribute to quicker, younger outflows created by the concealed companion star. The existence of a stellar sibling to the primary star “will complicate profoundly” the straightforward one-star theory that explains the formation of these nebulas, Kastner stated during the press conference.
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