• News
  • Film and TV
  • Music
  • Tech
  • Features
  • Celebrity
  • Politics
  • Weird
  • Community
  • Advertise
  • Terms
  • Privacy & Cookies
  • LADbible Group
  • LADbible
  • SPORTbible
  • GAMINGbible
  • Tyla
  • UNILAD Tech
  • FOODbible
  • License Our Content
  • About Us & Contact
  • Jobs
  • Latest
  • Topics A-Z
  • Authors
Facebook
Instagram
X
Threads
TikTok
YouTube
Submit Your Content
NASA spots new details of dying star that shows what will happen to our sun

Home> Technology> Space

Published 21:15 21 Aug 2023 GMT+1

NASA spots new details of dying star that shows what will happen to our sun

The James Webb Space Telescope captured the incredible images

Jess Battison

Jess Battison

NASA has spotted new details of a dying star which gives us a glimpse into what could happen to our Sun.

But obviously don’t start panicking, we’ve literally got billions of years left.

With new images of this dying star at the centre of the Ring Nebula (2,600 light years away from us), astronomers have apparently been able to reveal structures that no previous telescope has been able to detect.

They were taken by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) between July and August last year.

Advert

Also known as ‘Messier 57’, the incredible object in the images was born from a dying star that expelled its outer layers into space.

And now a team of scientists led by researchers at Cardiff University say the pictures actually reveal a triple-star system.

Images were captured by the James Webb Space Telescope.
ESA/Webb/NASA/CSA/M. Barlow

The incredible images obtained by the JWST show around 20,000 dust clouds, known as globules, in the nebula.

Advert

Dr Roger Wesson, a research associate at the Welsh university, led the analysis.

According to NASA blogs, he said: “We can now see the subtle influence of a third, previously unknown star in the system, alongside a much more distant companion which was identified in 2021."

Wesson says that the Ring Nebula is ‘an ideal target to unravel some of the mysteries of planetary nebulae’.

You can actually often see it for yourself with binoculars from the northern hemisphere, and 'much of the southern, on a clear summer evening.

Advert

Planetary nebulae, like this Ring, form when stars with up to about eight times the mass of our Sun ‘exhaust the hydrogen in their cores and eject their outer layers’, the BBC says.

The Ring Nebula.
ESA/Webb/NASA/CSA/M. Barlow

And Wesson was ‘stunned by the amount of detail’ in the images.

He went on to dissect them, saying: “Within the ring, there is a narrow band of emission from polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs – complex carbon-bearing molecules that we would not expect to form in the Ring Nebula.

Advert

"Outside the bright ring, we see curious “spikes” pointing directly away from the central star, which are prominent in the infrared but were only very faintly visible in Hubble Space Telescope images.

"We think these could be due to molecules that can form in the shadows of the densest parts of the ring, where they are shielded from the direct, intense radiation from the hot central star."

Wesson added: “Planetary nebulae were once thought of as very simple objects, roughly spherical and with a single star at their centre.

"Hubble showed that they were much more complicated than that, and with these latest images JWST is revealing yet more intricate detail in these objects."

Advert

Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg, as Wesson says that 'a little help from a binary companion' might be the key to understanding this phenomena.

Featured Image Credit: ESA/Webb/NASA/CSA/M. Barlow

Topics: NASA, Space, Science, Technology

Jess Battison
Jess Battison

Jess is an Entertainment Journalist with a love of all things pop culture. Her main interests include keeping up with the Twitter girlies, waiting for a new series of The Traitors and losing her voice at a Beyoncé concert. She graduated with a first in Journalism from City, University of London in 2021 and has previously worked at MyLondon.

X

@jessbattison_

Advert

Advert

Advert

Choose your content:

6 hours ago
11 hours ago
2 days ago
4 days ago
  • 6 hours ago

    Scientist issues warning the shortest day in history will happen in weeks as Earth's rotation is speeding up

    Graham Jones, an astrophysicist at the University of London, predicted when it will shorten our days

    Technology
  • 11 hours ago

    Scientists left baffled after discovering interstellar object hurtling towards our solar system

    It's only the third time in history that astronomers have witnessed something like this in space

    Technology
  • 2 days ago

    Everyone's saying the same thing after clip of Elon Musk resurfaces claiming we're 'summoning the demon' with AI

    Musk has since developed robots, self-driving cars and an AI platform integrated into X

    Technology
  • 4 days ago

    Important reason why you should blur your house on Google Maps

    One Redditor claimed they'd taken the plunge after a 'number of break-ins and incidents'

    Technology
  • NASA warns about airplane-sized asteroid that will fly past Earth tonight
  • Asteroid worth $10,000,000,000,000,000,000 that NASA is capturing appears to be rusting
  • NASA discovered planet bigger than Earth with a gas that is 'only produced by life'
  • NASA is offering $3,000,000 to anyone who can solve how to do this one thing in space