This outer shell of material eventually cools and disperses to form a variety of different shapes, including wispy clouds, expanding bubbles or ring-shaped nebulas like M57. This initially causes the star to swell out as a red giant, a phase which the sun will undergo in around 5 billion years when it will puff out to around the orbit of Mars, consuming the inner planets, including Earth. When stars of similar sizes to the sun exhaust their fuel for nuclear fusion, they can no longer support themselves against the inward force of their own gravity, ending the balancing act that kept the star stable for as long as billions of years.Īs the core collapses, the outer layers of the star, where nuclear fusion still proceeds, are blasted outwards. (Image credit: NASA/ESA/CSA/Institute for Earth and Space Exploration/JWST Ring Nebula Imaging Project) A sneak peak at the sun's future One of the central stars of the Ring Nebula (Messier 57) as seen by the James Webb Space Telescope. "The high-resolution images not only showcase the intricate details of the nebula's expanding shell but also reveal the inner region around the central white dwarf in exquisite clarity." "The James Webb Space Telescope has provided us with an extraordinary view of the Ring Nebula that we've never seen before," University College London professor and co-lead scientist of the JWST Ring Nebula Imaging Project, Mike Barlow, said. That means that observing the Ring Nebula with space telescopes offers astronomers the opportunity to see what is going on within planetary nebula and shed light on the life and death of stars. M57, or the Ring Nebula, is particularly fascinating to astronomers because not only is it close enough to be viewed with even amateur telescopes, but from our vantage point in the solar system, the planetary nebula is tilted so that it is viewed face-on.
At its heart is a white speck that represents a white dwarf star - what remains of that extinct stellar body's core. The Ring Nebula is the glowing remains of a long-dead star, a class of astronomical object called a "planetary nebula," which somewhat confusingly has nothing to do with planets.
The Ring Nebula or Messier 57 as never seen before in images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope (Image credit: NASA/ESA/CSA/Institute for Earth and Space Exploration/JWST Ring Nebula Imaging Project)
0 kommentar(er)
