![]() One feature especially caught the astronomers' eyes: concentric layers spreading outward toward the ring's edges like ripples in a pond. Under Webb's penetrating gaze, the relatively smooth surface of the ring-shaped cloud seen by Hubble, turned into a mass of swirling streams and dust filaments. The system of two stars suddenly became a system of three. The only plausible conclusion, De Marco said, was that another, invisible small star was orbiting the white dwarf much closer in, releasing the dust. But the known bright companion of the white dwarf at the center of the Southern Ring Nebula was too far away to be affected by the white dwarf. ![]() Such disks are usually made of material from a smaller star orbiting a more massive star, whose gravity disturbs the companion. Immediately the astronomers wondered how the dust disk came into being. "So, immediately, we knew that there must be a lot of cool dust enshrouding the white dwarf, there is a cool disk of dust."Īn image of the Southern Ring Nebula by the James Webb Space Telescope's MIRI instrument reveals that one of the central stars is oddly red. "White dwarfs are hot, they don't shine in this wavelength," De Marco said. And strangely, the star that the astronomers knew as the white dwarf was unexpectedly red. Instead of the one large and one tiny star known from Hubble's view, two stars of equal sizes emerged. It was MIRI's view that immediately sparked the astronomers' interest. ![]() The telescope of the century imaged the cloud with two of its instruments, the Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam), which sees warmer objects such as stars, and the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), which is a champion at spotting dust. ![]() Webb provided a more complex view of the nebula. In the images from Hubble, the shed layers form a rather smooth ring-shaped cloud, while the white dwarf can be seen as a small speck of light at the center of the ring, outshone by a much brighter, still fully alive, companion star some 1,300 sun-Earth distances away. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |