The Webb space telescope has stared deep into the darkness of the Helix Nebula, revealing layers of gas shed by a dying star to seed the cosmos with future generations of stars and planets.
A new Webb image captures a zoomed-in view of the iconic nebula, also known as the Eye of Sauron or Eye of God for its piercing, eye-shaped appearance. At its center is a blazing white dwarf—the leftover core of a dying star—releasing an avalanche of material that crashes into a colder surrounding shell of gas and dust.
The image provides a glimpse into the future of stars like the Sun once they’ve reached the end of their life cycle, recycling material of their own to birth new planetary systems.
Clear vision
Using Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera), the small portion of the Helix Nebula comes into full view to reveal comet-like knots, blazing stellar winds, and layers of gas.
The high-resolution image shows cloudy pillars that resemble flames surrounding the inner region of an expanding shell of gas. Winds of fast-moving, hot gas from the dying star crash into slower, colder shells of gas and dust shed by the star at an earlier point in its life, creating the nebula’s unique shape.
The white dwarf, out of the frame of Webb’s zoomed-in image, lies at the heart of the nebula. Radiation from the dying star lights up the surrounding gas, creating layers of material like a cosmic lasagna. Closest to the white dwarf is hot ionized gas, with cooler molecular hydrogen farther out and protective pockets within dust clouds where more complex molecules can start to form. This is the raw material that could eventually mold itself into planets and star systems.
In the Webb image, the temperature and chemistry of the material are represented by different colors. The blue hue marks the hottest gas in this field, energized by intense ultraviolet light from the white dwarf. Farther out, the gas cools into the yellow regions where hydrogen atoms join into molecules. At the nebula’s outer edges, reddish tones mark the coolest material, where thinning gas gives way to dust formation, according to NASA.
A dying star
The nebula was first spotted in the 1800s and has since become one of the most iconic features of our night skies for its striking shape and proximity. Located just 650 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Aquarius, the eye-shaped nebula is one of the closest of all bright planetary nebulae to our planet’s view.
Astronomers have used ground-based and space observatories to stare into the Eye of Sauron, observing the final moments of a dying star in great detail.
Source: gizmodo.com
