The Southern Ring Nebula looks like a bomb dropped in the ocean, tsunami waves rushing into the darkness. Cosmic light, represented in the colors of lapis stone, seems to fill a gaping crater in space.
NASA scientists, giddy to unveil the new image from the James Webb Space Telescope at an event earlier this week, beamed with delight. There it is, they said: a dying star. It had peeled off its outermost layers, a sea foam of molecular hydrogen.
But for fatalists the world over, gazing into this planetary nebula some 2,500 light-years away may not have inspired celebratory feelings—rather, a premonition of what’s to come. Perhaps Joel Achenbach, a reporter for the Washington Post, felt it too.
“Are we sad about the death of the star?” he asked the pundits during a televised news conference on Tuesday.
Laughter followed. But it’s easy to internalize the history of the Southern Ring Nebula as the sun’s own destiny – written in the stars.
SEE ALSO: Webb and Hubble images of the Carina Nebula paint stunning views of the universe Tweet may have been deleted (opens in new tab)
In the past six months since Webb launched into space, NASA has promised that this telescope will shatter the universe wide with its penetrating vision and scientific capabilities, revealing to humanity the secrets of how it all began. Astrophysicists who saw glimpses of the first images told reporters that they experienced a shudder or “awful scream” as some of the first existing galaxies popped into focus. Yet perhaps just as fascinating as the origin story is the answer to how it all ends.
Dying Star wheezes. Poof… Poof… Poof… each successive cloud ring dries the star down to its core, a white dwarf of carbon and oxygen. It will get cold. Then the light goes out.
Unlike giant stars that explode in a supernova and collapse into a black hole, an average star like the one creating a planetary nebula runs out of nuclear fuel and suffers a more tortured end.
“It’s not just a star — it’s a star that looks a lot like the sun,” said Klaus Pontoppidan, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, “at least as the sun will be in 5 billion years when the sun dies. “
“It’s not just a star — it’s a star that’s very similar to the sun, at least as the sun will be in 5 billion years when the sun dies.”
The photo, among the first released by the $10 billion space observatory, looks as if scientists aimed the telescope at just the right moment to capture a cataclysmic event. And indeed, the 10,000 years or so of this phase is but a moment in the 13.8 billion years of the universe.
Tweet may have been deleted (opens in new tab)
However, finding it was no accident. Astronomers have known about the Southern Ring Nebula, also known as NGC 3132, since before pasteurized milk. As scientific knowledge advanced, they began to better understand planetary nebulae (a confusing misnomer because they have nothing to do with planets) as the death throes of medium-sized stars. Scientists have found several thousand of them in the Milky Way.
The late British astronomer David S. Evans even suspected in 1968 that there were actually two stars at the core of this nebula, although one must be hidden by gas and dust. The breakthrough of Webb’s picture, 54 years later, is the ability to see the darker star — the true source of the nebula — in full detail with the telescope’s mid-infrared instrument.
NASA scientists marveled at the display’s intricate details. There are bright, straight pins of light along the outer edges. These are spotlights from the central stars, like those biblical images of God, sunbeams pouring through parting clouds after a storm.
The European Space Agency has released the highest-resolution image of the sun and its corona ever taken in March 2022. Credit: ESA / NASA / Solar Orbiter / EUI Team / Data processing: E. Kraaikamp (ROB)
The Sun is halfway to the fate of the Southern Ring, said Paul Sutter, a research professor at Stony Brook University and author of “How to Die in Space.”
Researchers have estimated the age of the sun by observing all kinds of stars at different intervals. Think of it as taking snapshots of people at different stages of life, Sutter says: babies are born, Little League games, weddings, illness, and then death. These observations are combined with knowledge of the physics going on in the sun’s core.
“It turns out that our sun is middle-aged. He is currently going through a midlife crisis. He just bought a Corvette and is worried about his retirement fund. It’s right there.”
“It turns out that our sun is middle-aged,” Sutter said. “He’s going through a midlife crisis right now. He just bought a Corvette and is worried about his retirement fund. It’s right there.”
The image of the Southern Ring Nebula taken in December 1995 by the Hubble Space Telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope’s predecessor in visible light, lacks the intricate detail revealed in the new images. Courtesy: NASA/Hubble Legacy Team (STScI/AURA/NASA)
In astronomy, looking farther becomes looking into the past, because light and other forms of radiation must travel incredible distances to reach us. It is possible that the Southern Ring’s light show is already over, its white dwarf can no longer illuminate it. But in all likelihood, it’s probably continuing, albeit weaker, says Rodolfo Montez, who studies dying solar stars at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
Using the Hubble Space Telescope, Webb’s predecessor in visible light, planetary nebula experts have found so many irregular, non-spherical shapes among these celestial structures influenced by a second central star that they wonder if the presence of an extra star is actually a key ingredient in their creation .
“This is called the binary hypothesis, which suggests that all stars in binary systems make planetary nebulae,” Mondes said. “But then we’re not sure what single stars like our sun would do in that frame.”
Just another mystery for Webb to solve.
This side-by-side comparison shows observations of the Southern Ring Nebula in near-infrared, left, and mid-infrared, right, from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Courtesy: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI
Ripples emitted by a dying star in the Southern Ring Nebula carry metals through space as spores. These last gasps will forge molecules and sprout new objects in space. Stars are element factories, astrophysicists say: They produce carbon, for example, the same chemical on which humans and much of life on Earth are based.
Are we sad about the death of the star?
Pontoppidan gave an indirect answer. His answer was based on science, but sounded almost spiritual.
“This is the end for the star,” he said. “But this is the beginning for other stars and for other planetary systems.”
Add Comment