The stunning filaments and coils of light that make up the Southern Ring Nebula were formed by as many as five stars orbiting each other in a complex dance.
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January 20, 2023
Southern Ring Nebula.The image on the left highlights very hot gas, and the image on the right highlights the stars. Joseph DePascal/STScI
The Southern Ring Nebula is full of stars. Nebulae, giant clouds of cosmic gas and debris, were thought to be created from the death of a single star, but this stellar swoop and swirl is formed by at least four stars orbiting each other. it was done.
Orsola De Marco and her colleagues at Macquarie University, Australia, used the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to observe the nebula, also known as NGC 3132, and created a three-dimensional model to understand its internal structure. “Ideally, you’d find a companion star and rewind time. You can’t really do that, so you’d have to work like an investigator at a crime scene, and the nebula itself would tell you what happened.” They’ll give it to you,” says De Marco.
When stars about the size of our sun die, the outer layers peel off, leaving the star core in the middle that heats them up and makes them glow. Before these new images, we knew there were two other stars of hers orbiting the primary star that created the Southern Ring Nebula.
The JWST images revealed a dusty disk around the host star. This must have been caused by an additional companion star orbiting closer than we knew for the distance between the Earth and the Sun. may have coalesced.
A series of arches that look like rings of tree stumps can also be seen on the outer edge of the nebula. The spacing of these rings allowed researchers to calculate the distance between the host star and the stars that carved them into the expanding gas cloud. This should be 40 to 60 times further away than the star that created the dust disk.
“Every time a ring like this exists, the only explanation that actually works is that when the star is shedding, it has a companion star around it that leaves trails in the material as it orbits. says De Marco. “You need a companion to make the ring, but it can’t be the same companion that made the disc.”
Finally, a 3D model of the nebula revealed evidence of a possible fifth star. The reconstruction looks a bit like a lumpy egg, with each bump paired on opposite sides of the gas cloud. These clumps are most likely formed by jets from the central star, but the only way to give them random orientation is by the chaotic orbits of three nearby stars. That would require an additional star orbiting the primary star and a very nearby star that created the dust disk, making the Southern Ring a five-star stellar star.
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