It was one of the first famous images revealed by the James Webb Space Telescope earlier this year: a stunning veil of gas and dust lit by a dying star at its heart. Now, scientists analyzing data from the most powerful telescope in history have found evidence of at least two previously unknown stars lurking in the stellar graveyard.
The Southern Ring Nebula, located in the Milky Way about 2,000 light-years from Earth, was previously thought to contain two stars. One, nestled in the center of the nebula, is a white dwarf that, in its dying throes, has been throwing up streams of gas and dust for thousands of years, which in turn form the surrounding cloud.
Stripped of its brightness, the extremely hot white dwarf is the less visible of the two stars seen in the Webb images released in July. A white dwarf has offered astronomers a glimpse into how our Sun could one day die—in billions of years. Unlike our lonely Sun, it has a companion, the brighter of the two stars in Webb’s images. However, this binary system, which is common throughout the Milky Way, does not explain the nebula’s “atypical” structure, Philippe Amram, an astrophysicist at France’s Marseille Astrophysics Laboratory.
Amram is one of the co-authors of a study published Thursday in the journal Nature Astronomy that used Webb’s observations to reveal more of the nebula’s secrets. Ever since the nebula was discovered by English astronomer John Herschel in 1835, astronomers have wondered why it has “such a bizarre shape, it’s not actually spherical,” Amram said. By analyzing data from Webb’s infrared cameras, scientists said they found evidence of at least two other stars inside the nebula, which has a diameter equivalent to 1,500 times the distance from the Sun to Pluto.
While the new pair is slightly further away from the white dwarf and its companion, all four stars – or perhaps even five – are located at the center of the nebula. They are close enough to interact, and their “energy exchanges” create the nebula’s peculiar shape, Amram said. The Webb Telescope, which has been in operation since July, has already released a number of unprecedented data, and scientists hope it will herald a new era of discovery.
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