The Hubble Space Telescope gave us the most detailed observations ever obtained of the Ring Nebula. It’s a well known nebula but it still had some secrets. Now it’s been possible to build a three-dimensional model which includes the surrounding region by combining observations taken using Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 with other ones such as the infrared ones from the Telescope Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) on Mount Graham, Arizona, and the spectroscopic data from the San Pedro Martir Observatory in Mexico.
The Ring Nebula was discovered in January 1779 by Antoine de Darquier Pellepoix and a few days later independently by Charles Messier, who inserted it in his catalog as Messier 57 or M57. It’s also cataloged as NGC 6720. This nebula is located in the Lyra constellation and is at a distance estimated to be about 2,000 light years from Earth.
The Ring Nebula is formed by a star that originally had a mass several times that of the Sun in the last phase of its life. About 4,000 years ago it passed through the red giant phase expelling gas layers then it collapsed. The ring-shaped outer layers were formed when gases that expanded at a higher speed hit other materials that were moving more slowly.
The Hubble Space Telescope had already been previously used to study the Ring Nebula and one of the images had become particularly famous for its shape and color details. In the course of this new research, a team led by C. Robert O’Dell of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, has compared the new images with those taken in 1998 to assess the evolution of the nebula.
According to the calculations made, the Ring Nebula is expanding at a speed higher than 69,000 km/h (43,000 mph). According to the scientists who carried out the research, it will keep on expanding for another 10,000 years, during which it will become less and less luminous until the gas will disperse in the almost empty interstellar medium. At that point, what remains of the central star will become a white dwarf.
The Wide Field Camera 3 was installed in the Hubble Space Telescope in 2009 and among other things it allowed to get more details on the Ring Nebula. It seems that the ring wraps a blue structure that has the shape of an American football whose ends protrude out from the ring’s sides.
The new view of the Ring Nebula is really amazing but in addition to the show it gives us it’s interesting because it gives us an idea of what will happen to the Sun in about six billion years. The star that originated the Ring Nebula was much more massive than the Sun so the nebula is brighter allowing us to admire it and study it.
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