Universe Finder

Is the Ring Nebula a ring? No - it is a barrel of gas, and we are looking straight down it. That is NASA's own phrasing. The famous smoke ring is a distorted doughnut seen almost pole-on, with a rugby-ball of thinner gas filling the middle and stretching toward us. It sits about 2,500 light-years away in Lyra (Gaia puts it at 790 ± 30 parsecs) and spans about a light-year: the outer layers of a star a little heavier than the Sun, thrown off a few thousand years ago and still expanding at over twenty kilometres a second, lit by the exposed core - over a hundred thousand degrees, on its way to becoming a white dwarf. In 2023 Webb's images let astronomers estimate some 20,000 dense knots of molecular hydrogen in the shell, and ten faint, evenly spaced arcs outside it. The arcs may be the fingerprint of a companion star no one has seen, orbiting about as far out as Pluto, once every ~280 years - an inference, not a detection. In about five billion years the Sun gets this kind of ending. Find it yourself: start at Vega, one of the brightest stars in the sky - the Ring sits just below it, between the two bottom stars of Lyra. It is magnitude 8.8, so you will need a telescope. Fly to the Ring Nebula in the real 3D map: https://universefinder.com/?o=Ring+Nebula&deep=1&utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=organic_social&utm_campaign=ring_nebula_short Where should we fly next? A — Jupiter 🪐 B — the Crab Nebula 💥 Comment A or B. Sources: Wesson et al. 2024 (MNRAS 528, 3392) - Gaia distance 790 ± 30 pc, ~20,000 globules, ten arcs, inferred companion; ESA/Webb weic2320 (2023); ESA/Hubble heic1310 (2013) - the doughnut-and-rugby-ball shape; NASA Hubble Heritage 1999 - 'looking down a barrel of gas'; NASA Messier 57 page; NASA Sun facts. Images: NASA, ESA, and C. Robert O'Dell (Vanderbilt University) · ESA/Webb, NASA, CSA, M. Barlow, N. Cox, R. Wesson · poll plates NASA, ESA, A. Simon, M.H. Wong; NASA, ESA, J. Hester and A. Loll. #ringnebula #m57 #planetarynebula #jwst #hubble #astronomy #space #stargazing #universe #science