Astronomers find mysterious iron ‘bar’ inside Ring Nebula
Astronomers have detected a strange bar-shaped cloud of iron atoms stretching across the well-known Ring Nebula, raising new questions about the object that has been studied for centuries.
The iron cloud — roughly 3.7 trillion miles long — was spotted using the new WEAVE instrument on Spain’s William Herschel Telescope. Researchers say the mass of iron detected is comparable to Earth’s iron core, News.Az reports, citing Reuters.
One hypothesis is that the material could be the remnants of a rocky planet that was vaporized when the nebula’s central star shed its outer layers, though scientists caution that the idea remains speculative.
“It is exciting that such a familiar object can still surprise us when observed in a new way,” said astronomer Roger Wesson, whose team published the study in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
No other detected elements appear in this same bar-shaped formation, making the feature even more puzzling. Scientists say further data will be needed to determine how the iron formed and why it is arranged this way.
The Ring Nebula, also known as Messier 57, sits roughly 2,600 light years from Earth in the constellation Lyra and formed about 4,000 years ago when a star twice the mass of the Sun became a white dwarf. Despite its fame in astronomy textbooks and telescopes, the new finding shows there is still much to learn.
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