This is the Ring Nebula or M57
Original image
- When it was first seen through a telescope in the 1700s, it looked round and fuzzy, and astronomers at the time thought it looked like a distant planet. It was named by William Herschel. [Mobile]
- The Ring Nebula is the remnant of a dying Sun-like star. The star has shed its outer layers of gas into space at the end of its life, and its inner core is slowly becoming a white dwarf star.
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Original image |
- You can see it in the picture as a hollow ring. But scientists have now seen with advanced instruments like the James Webb Telescope that its true shape is not a hollow ring, but rather an elongated structure like a rugby ball. We see it as a ring because it is tilted towards our Earth in such a way that we are looking along its center.
- It is located about 2,300 light-years from Earth. It would take millions of years to get there with our current technology!
- The nebula is about 1 light-year in diameter, which means that it takes a full year for light to travel from one end to the other.
- The nebula's gases are expanding outward at about 40,000 kilometers per hour. This may seem like a very fast speed, but compared to the vastness of space, this speed is very slow.
- The brightest parts of the nebula are red, green, and blue. These colors come from the atoms of different gases:
* Red - nitrogen and hydrogen.
* Green - oxygen.
* Blue - helium.
- The white dwarf at the center of the nebula is about 60% the size of our Sun and is incredibly hot. Its surface temperature is about 120,000 degrees Celsius.
- This central white dwarf is now exhausting all its energy and cooling and fading away. In a few billion years, it will become a black dwarf and merge into the darkness of the universe.
- It is located in the constellation Lyra in the night sky and is so bright that it can be easily seen using a small telescope or powerful binoculars. It is the 57th object in the Messier catalog, hence its other name M57.
- The James Webb Space Telescope has found about 20,000 small ball-like structures within this nebula, which are thought to be made of hydrogen gas. This discovery has given scientists new ideas about the formation and evolution of the nebula.
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