Spectacular Webb telescope image shows a stellar death like never before

The Southern Ring Nebula looked like a bomb dropped into the ocean. The colors of a lapis stone appear to fill a gaping crater in space.

At an event earlier this week, NASA scientists were excited to show the new image from the James Webb Space Telescope. They said it was a dying star. There was a sea foam of hydrogen on top of it.

Looking into this planetary nebula some 2,500 light-years away may not have inspired celebratory feelings for fatalists. The Washington Post reporter may have felt it as well.

He asked the experts if they were sad about the star's death.

The chuckles followed. It's easy to see that the sun's own destiny is written in the stars.

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NASA has been promising for the past six months that the telescope will open the universe wide open with its penetrating vision and science capabilities. Some of the very first galaxies to exist popped into focus as Astrophysicists who saw sneak previews of the first images cried. The answer to how this all ends is just as compelling.

The dying star is making noise. The star is a white dwarf of carbon and oxygen. It won't grow well. The light stops working.

Unlike giant stars that explode into a supernova and collapse into a black hole, a medium star like the one creating a planetary nebula runs out of nuclear fuel and dies.

Klaus Pontoppidan, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, said that the star is similar to the sun.

The photo, among the first released from the $10 billion observatory in space, appears to show scientists pointing the telescope at the right moment to catch a big event. The 10,000-or-so years of this phase are close to the time of the universe.

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It wasn't happenstance to find it. Astronomers have known about the Southern Ring Nebula for a long time. They came to understand planetary nebulas as the death throes of medium-sized stars because of scientific knowledge. A few thousand of them have been found in the stars.

The astronomer David S. Evans suspected in 1968 that there were two stars at the center of the nebula. 54 years later, the ability to see the dimmer star in full detail with the telescope's mid-Infrared instrument has been revealed.

The detail on display was awe inspiring. Straight pins of light can be seen on the outer edges. Sunbeams pouring through clouds after a storm are spotlights from the central stars.

The European Space Agency released the highest resolution image of the sun and its corona ever taken in March 2022. Credit: ESA / NASA / Solar Orbiter / EUI Team / Data Processing: E. Kraaikamp (ROB)

The author of How to Die in Space said that the sun is halfway to the southern ring's fate.

Researchers estimate the age of the sun by looking at stars at different times. Babies being born, Little League games, weddings, sickness, and then death are some of the things that can be taken into account. The knowledge of the physics in the sun's core is combined with those observations.

The sun is middle aged. Right now, it's going through a midlife crisis. It just bought a car and is worried about its money. It is.

The image of the Southern Ring Nebula captured in December 1995 by the Hubble Space Telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope's visible-light predecessor, lacks the intricate details revealed in the new images. Credit: NASA / The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI / AURA / NASA)

Light and other forms of radiation have to travel a long way to reach us. It is possible that the Southern Ring light show is over because the white dwarf can't illuminate it. According to Rodolfo Montez, who studies dying sunlike stars at the Center for Harvard and Smithsonian, it is most likely ongoing.

Through the Hubble Space Telescope, planetary nebula experts have found many irregular, non-spherical shapes, which they wonder if having an extra star is actually a key ingredient for their creation.

Mondez said that the hypothesis suggests that all stars in the same system make planets. We don't know what single stars would do in that framework.

It's another mystery for the man to untangle.

This side-by-side comparison shows observations of the Southern Ring Nebula in near-infrared light, at left, and mid-infrared light, at right, from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Credit: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI

The ripples from the dying star carry metal through space. New objects will be created in the last gasp. The same chemical on which humans and much of life on Earth are based is made by stars.

We are sad about the death of the star.

An indirect reply was given by Pontoppidan. His answer was based on science.

He said this was the end for the star. It's the start for other stars and planetary systems.