The nebula of the Southern Ring looks like a bomb falling into an ocean, the tsunami waves lengthened, in the dark. Cosmic light, presented with the colors of a lapis lazuli stone, seems to fill an open crater in space.
NASA scientists, dizzy to reveal the new image of the James Webb space telescope at an event earlier this week, radiated pleasure. Here it is, they said: a dying star. Its outermost layers, a marine foam of molecular hydrogen, had been wiped out.
But for fatalists around the world, looking at this planetary nebula about 2,500 light-years away may not have inspired feelings of celebration, rather, a foreboding of what is to come. Perhaps Joel Achenbach, a Washington Post reporter, heard it too.
“Are we sad about the star’s death?” he asked experts during a press conference broadcast on Tuesday.
Laughter followed. But it is easy to internalize the history of the southern ring nebula as the sun’s own destiny, written, well, in the stars.
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For the past six months since Webb was launched into space, NASA has promised that this telescope would open up the universe with its penetrating vision and scientific capabilities, bringing to humanity the secrets of how it all began. Astrophysicists who saw previews of the first images told reporters they had chills or an “ugly cry” when some of the first galaxies that existed were focused. However, perhaps as compelling as the origin story is the answer to how it all ends.
The dying sibyl star. Puff … Puff … Puff … each successive ring of clouds withers the star to its core, a white dwarf of carbon and oxygen. It will be cold. Then the light goes out.
Unlike giant stars that explode in a supernova and sink into a black hole, a medium-sized star like the one that creates a planetary nebula runs out of nuclear fuel and suffers a more tortured end.
“It’s not just any star, it’s a star that looks a lot like the sun,” said Klaus Pontoppidan, an astronomer at the Baltimore Space Telescope Science Institute, “at least how the sun will be in 5 billion years. years when the sun dies. “
“It’s not just any star, it’s a star that looks a lot like the sun, at least as it will be in 5 billion years when the sun dies.”
The photo, one of the first published from the $ 10 billion observatory in space, looks as if scientists were aiming at the telescope at just the right time to capture a cataclysmic event. And, in fact, the 10,000 years or so of this phase are only a moment relative to the 13.8 billion years of the universe.
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Finding him, however, was no accident. Astronomers have known the southern ring nebula, also known as NGC 3132, since before pasteurized milk. As scientific knowledge progressed, they came to better understand planetary nebulae (a confusing wrong name because they have nothing to do with planets), as the agony of medium-sized stars. Scientists have discovered several thousand of them in the Milky Way.
The late British astronomer David S. Evans even suspected in 1968 that at the core of this nebula were actually two stars, although one should be hidden by gas and dust. The revelation of Webb’s photo, 54 years later, is the ability to see the faintest star, the true source of the nebula, in great detail with the telescope’s mid-infrared instrument.
NASA scientists marveled at the intricate detail shown. On the outer edges are bright, straight light needles. They are foci of the central stars, like those biblical representations of God, rays of the sun pouring through the clouds after a storm.
The European Space Agency released the highest resolution image of the sun and its crown ever made in March 2022. Credit: ESA / NASA / Solar Orbiter / EUI Team / Data Processing: E. Kraaikamp (ROB)
The sun is halfway to the fate of the southern ring, said Paul Sutter, a research professor at Stony Brook University and author of How to Die in Space.
Researchers have estimated the age of the sun by observing all kinds of stars at different intervals. Think about it like taking snapshots of people at different stages of life, Sutter says: baby birth, Little League games, weddings, illness and then death. These observations are combined with knowledge of physics happening in the core of the sun.
“It turns out our sun is middle-aged. He’s going through a middle-aged crisis right now. He’s just bought a Corvette and he’s worried about his retirement fund. It’s right there.”
“It turns out our sun is middle-aged,” Sutter said. “Right now he’s going through a midlife crisis. He just bought a Corvette and is worried about his retirement fund. It’s right there.”
The image of the southern ring nebula captured in December 1995 by the Hubble Space Telescope, the visible light predecessor of the James Webb Space Telescope, lacks the complex details revealed in the new images. Credit: NASA / The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI / AURA / NASA)
In astronomy, looking further translates into observing the past because light and other forms of radiation have to travel incredible distances to reach us. It is conceivable that the South Ring light show is over, its white dwarf can no longer illuminate it. But in all likelihood, it’s probably going on, albeit more faintly, says Rodolfo Montez, who studies sun-dying stars at the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
Through the Hubble Space Telescope, Webb’s predecessor of visible light, experts in planetary nebulae have found so many irregular, non-spherical shapes between these celestial structures, influenced by a second central star, that they wonder if they have the extra star. it’s really a key ingredient. for its creation.
“It’s called the binary hypothesis, which would suggest that all the stars in binary systems make planetary nebulae,” Mondez said. “But then we’re not clear what stars like our sun would do in that frame.”
Just one more mystery for Webb to unravel.
This parallel comparison shows observations of the southern ring nebula in near-infrared light, on the left, and mid-infrared light, on the right, from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Credit: NASA / ESA / CSA / STScI
The ripples coming off the dying star in the southern ring nebula carry metals through space like spores. These last breaths will forge molecules and germinate new objects into the cosmos. Astrophysicists say that stars are factories of elements: they make carbon, for example, the same chemical on which humans and much of life on Earth are based.
Are we sad about the death of the star?
Pontoppidan gave an indirect answer. His answer was based on science, but it sounded almost spiritual.
“This is the end of the star,” he said. “But it’s the beginning for other stars and for other planetary systems.”