Astronomers have used the James Webb Space Telescope for a fresh perspective of an iconic celestial favorite called the Ring Nebula.
The new image captures never-before-seen details within the colorful nebula, located in the Lyra constellation about 2,600 light-years from Earth.
The structure of the Ring Nebula can be glimpsed through amateur telescopes and has been observed and studied for years.
The planetary nebula, which despite its name has nothing to do with planets, is home to the remnants of a dying star as it releases the bulk of its mass.
Planetary nebulae usually have a rounded structure and were so named because they initially resembled the disks from which planets form when French astronomer Charles Messier discovered the first one in 1764.
“I first saw the Ring Nebula as a kid through just a small telescope. I would never have thought that one day, I would be part of the team that would use the most powerful space telescope ever built, to look at this object,” said astrophysicist Jan Cami, a core member of the JWST Ring Nebula Imaging Project, in a statement. He is a professor of physics and astronomy at the Western University’s Institute for Earth and Space Exploration in London, Ontario.
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