The cooling core of a dying star heats the ejected gas with its radiation, which is why the nebula has its color.
The James Webb Space Telescope captured an image of the Annular Nebula, about 2,200 light-years from Earth. This is discussed on the telescope website.
According to scientists, this object, with a diameter of one light year, is not connected to the planets, but only got its name – a planetary nebula due to the fact that these objects often get somewhat round shape, and therefore. resembling the planets.
In fact, these gas accumulations are released into the upper layers of the star’s atmosphere, located in the center of such a nebula. Soon it will become a white dwarf – this is the last stage in the evolution of many stars.
For example, a few thousand years ago, this star was still a red giant, losing most of its mass.
This nebula is one of the finest examples of planetary nebulae known to astronomers. According to the scientists, they were surprised by the exquisite detail of the image. After all, the bright ring, which gave the nebula its name, consists of about 20 thousand individual clusters of dense molecular hydrogen gas, each of which is approximately the same mass as Earth .
In addition, they obtained additional information about the inner part of the planetary nebula, as well as ten concentric arcs in the outer regions of the object.
Scientists believe that these arcs should be formed approximately every 280 years, when the central star sheds its masses. But the surprise of this discovery lies in the fact that scientists do not know any example of the formation of such structures with such periodicity in planetary nebulae formed by a single star.
webbtelescope.org
It was previously reported that the James Webb telescope spotted a space object in the form of a question mark.
Source: korrespondent
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