The Ring Nebula — the glowing shell of gas around an old, dying star much like the Sun — is a favorite picture in astronomy books, and its neat ring shape seems simple. New observations by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope show it isn't.
A filled ring
A team led by C. Robert O'Dell of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, combined Hubble with several ground-based telescopes to get the best view yet of the nebula and build the most precise 3-D model of it so far. The structure turned out to be more complex than astronomers had assumed. As O'Dell put it, the Ring is less like a bagel than a jelly doughnut: there is material filling its middle. Hubble's sharper detail, he said, reveals a shape quite different from the one long pictured for this classic object.
Fast facts
| Type | planetary nebula — a glowing shroud of gas around an old, dying, sun-like star |
| Distance | about 2,000 light-years |
| Size | roughly 1 light-year across |
| Where to look | the constellation Lyra — a popular target for amateur astronomers |
Sources
Based on "Planetary Nebula," NASA Image and Video Library, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center; NASA material is in the public domain. Comments by C. Robert O'Dell of Vanderbilt University are rewritten in hubnx's own words.
Licence: CC0 1.0 (public domain) · Adapted from images.nasa.gov
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