The stunning filaments and coils of light that make up the Southern Ring Nebula were shaped by as many as five stars all orbiting one another in a complex dance
, and created a three-dimensional model to figure out its internal structure. “Ideally you would find the companion stars and wind back time. In practice you can’t do that, so you have to work like an investigator at the crime scene where the nebula itself is telling you what happened to it,” says De Marco.
When a star about the size of the sun dies, it sheds its outer layers and the stellar core left in the middle heats them and makes them glow. Before these new images, we knew that there were two other stars orbiting the main star that createdThe JWST images revealed a disc of dust around the primary star that must be caused by an additional companion star, orbiting even closer than the one we knew about – about the distance between Earth and the sun.
“Every time we’ve had rings like this, the only explanation that really works is that there is a companion around the star when the star is shedding, and as it orbits it imprints a track into the material,” says De Marco. “You need a companion to make the rings, but it cannot be the same companion that made the disc.”
Finally, the 3D model of the nebula revealed evidence of what may be a fifth star. The reconstruction looks a bit like a lumpy egg, and each bump is paired with another on the opposite side of the gas cloud. These lumps are most likely formed by, but the only way to give them the random orientations they seem to have would be through the chaotic orbits of three nearby stars.
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