Detailed images of the Ring Nebula captured by NASA's James Webb Telescope have been released.
The two new images released by NASA on Monday show the structures of the final stages of a dying star and help researchers better understand the life cycles of stars, according to the space agency.
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“When we first saw the images, we were stunned by the amount of detail in them. The bright ring that gives the nebula its name is composed of about 20,000 individual clumps of dense molecular hydrogen gas, each of them about as massive as the Earth," Roger Wesson, research associate in the School of Physics and Astronomy at Cardiff University, said in a statement.
"Within the ring, there is a narrow band of emission from polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs — complex carbon-bearing molecules that we would not expect to form in the Ring Nebula. Outside the bright ring, we see curious 'spikes' pointing directly away from the central star, which are prominent in the infrared but were only very faintly visible in Hubble Space Telescope images. We think these could be due to molecules that can form in the shadows of the densest parts of the ring, where they are shielded from the direct, intense radiation from the hot central star," he added.
Wesson also said the Mid-InfraRed Instrument images of the nebula brought the "surprising revelation" of 10 concentric features appearing within the halo outside the bright ring.
"Our MIRI images provided us with the sharpest and clearest view yet of the faint molecular halo outside the bright ring. A surprising revelation was the presence of up to ten regularly-spaced, concentric features within this faint halo. These arcs must have formed about every 280 years as the central star was shedding its outer layers," Wesson said.
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The James Webb Space Telescope was launched into space by NASA in December 2021. The space agency has been releasing the telescope's images since July 2022. NASA has released images of Neptune, Jupiter, and other parts of space from the Webb Telescope, providing pictures that are significantly better than those of previous telescopes.
Breakthroughs from the Webb Telescope have been able to allow scientists to understand better the formation of the universe and of planets, such as Earth.