One of the most photographed objects in the night sky is the Ring Nebula, the remnant of a bygone Sun-like star about 2,000 light-years from Earth. Its striking smoke ring-like appearance has both awed and perplexed astronomers, wondering whether the debris is really ring-shaped or whether its appearance was created by cosmic perspective. There has been a long debate about whether this is just an illusion.
New observations of the Ring Nebula track the movement of gas molecules along its boundaries, allowing astronomers to uncover more details about its structure. Joel Kastner of the Rochester Institute of Technology told reporters Tuesday (January 14) during the 245th annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society that the debris was shaped like a barrel, not a full ring. , said our perspective shows us to be directly below that pole. (AAS) Press Conference in Maryland.
We’re “looking right at the center of it, which is really amazing to me. We’re just lucky,” he said, adding that the discovery is essentially “a brand new story about an old astronomical friend.” He pointed out that it provides a “perspective.”
These discoveries will help scientists better understand the processes that form complex planetary nebulae, which, despite their name, actually have nothing to do with planets. In reality, they are the remains of a star like us that died a long time ago. This misnomer arose because these nebulae looked like planets when early astronomers viewed them through small telescopes.
“Planetary nebulae were once thought to be simple round objects with a single dying star in the centre,” said Roger Wesson, an astronomer at Cardiff University. statement. “The question arises: how do spherical stars create such complex and delicate non-spherical structures?”
To find out, Kastner and his colleagues last year collected high-resolution images of the Ring Nebula using the Submillimeter Array (SMA), a network of radio-receiving antennas atop Hawaii’s Mauna Kea.
Specifically, they mapped the movement of carbon monoxide gas molecules that outline the nebula. Kaestner said tracking the speed and position of these molecules, ejected by the dying Sun-like star that created the nebula about 4,000 years ago, revealed its 3D shape in detail. . This cannot be determined from decay images from telescopes, even powerful observatories like the Hubble Space Telescope or the James Webb Space Telescope.
The 3D model not only helps researchers pinpoint the nebula’s ellipsoidal structure, but also shows that the former star carcass known as a white dwarf (seen as a tiny white dot within the nebula) is actually located at its center. I also confirmed that it was located. .
“That was not a foregone conclusion,” Kaestner said at an AAS press conference. White dwarfs appear slightly off-center in many telescope images. But this could be due to our viewing angle and the slightly shifted “pole” of the remnant, rather than the star’s position itself, Kaestner explained.
recent exquisite images Observations from the James Webb Space Telescope reveal several concentric arcs just beyond the outer edge of the main ring that appear to form every 280 years.
However, there is no clear reason why this happens with such precise regularity, and astronomers have the following hypothesis: invisible friends This star probably orbits around a central white dwarf. Astronomers estimate that the hidden star must be at least as far away from its central star as Pluto is from the Sun, sculpted from material ejected from a dying star. , would have produced the amazingly complex nebulae that we see and love today.
In fact, in the new observations, Kastner and his team observed a “hole” in the nebula, which they attribute to a faster, younger outflow ejected by a hidden companion star. The presence of siblings of the central star would “severely disrupt” the simple single-star scenario that forms these nebulae, Kastner said at a press conference.
