NASA’s Webb Captures Dying Star’s Final ‘Performance’ in Fine Detail

The Southern Ring Nebula cataloged as NGC 3132 and known as Eight-Burst Nebula, or Caldwell 74 is a bright and extensively studied planetary nebula in the constellation Vela. It is located 2500 light years away from Earth. Two cameras aboard Webb captured the latest image of this planetary nebula. The dimmer star at the center of this scene has been sending out rings of gas and dust for thousands of years in every direction, and NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has revealed this star is cloaked in dust for the first time.

James Webb will tolerate astronomers to dig into many more special artifacts about planetary nebulae like this one – clouds of gas and dust thrown out by dying stars. Understanding which molecules are present, and where they lie throughout the shells of gas and dust will help researchers to clarify their knowledge of these objects.

This observation shows the Southern Ring Nebula almost face-on, but if we could rotate it to view it edge-on, its three-dimensional shape would more plainly look like two bowls placed together at the bottom, opening away from one another with a large hole at the center.

Two stars, which are locked in a compact orbit, shape the local environment. James Webb's infrared images feature new details in this most complex system. The stars and their layers of light are prominent in the image from Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) on the left, while the image from Webb’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) on the right shows for the first time that the second star is surrounded by dust. The brighter star is in an earlier stage of its stellar evolution and will probably eject its own planetary nebula in the future.

Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI

The James Webb Space Telescope is the world's premier space science observatory. James Webb will solve mysteries in our solar system, look beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probe the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).

NASA Headquarters oversees the mission for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages Webb for the agency and oversees work on the mission performed by the Space Telescope Science Institute, Northrop Grumman, and other mission partners. In addition to Goddard, several NASA centers contributed to the project, including the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston; Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California; Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama; Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley; and others.

NIRCam was built by a team at the University of Arizona and Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Technology Center.

MIRI was contributed by ESA and NASA, with the instrument designed and built by a consortium of nationally funded European Institutes (The MIRI European Consortium) in partnership with JPL and the University of Arizona.

At the moment, the brighter star influences the nebula’s appearance. As the pair continues to orbit one another, they “stir the pot” of gas and dust, causing asymmetrical patterns.

Each shell represents an episode where the fainter star lost some of its mass. The widest shells of gas toward the outer areas of the image were sent out earlier. Those nearest to the star are the most recently discharged gas. Detecting these ejections allows researchers to look into the history of the system.

Observations that are taken with NIRCam's images also reveal extremely fine rays of light around the planetary nebula. Starlight from the central stars streams out where there are holes in the gas and dust such as sunlight through gaps in a cloud.

Since planetary nebulae have lived for tens of thousands of years, observing the nebula is like watching a movie in exceptionally slow motion. Each shell the star puffed off gives researchers the ability to measure the gas and dust that are present within it accurately.

As the star discharges shells of material, dust and molecules form within them changing the landscape even as the star continues to throw out material. This dust will eventually enhance the areas around it, expanding into what’s known as the interstellar medium. And since it’s very long-lived, the dust may end up traveling through space for billions of years and become incorporated into a new star or planet.

In thousands of years, these delicate layers of gas and dust will dissipate into surrounding space.

Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam)

The Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) is James Webb's primary imager that will cover the infrared wavelength range of 0.6 to 5 microns. NIRCam is equipped with coronagraphs, instruments that allow astronomers to take pictures of very faint objects around a central bright object, like stellar systems.  Read More...