The Ring Nebula is a sight to behold. Located in the constellation Lyra, this kaleidoscopic doughnut of gas is the dying echo of a star not too unlike our sun. And according to a new study, it also hosts a never-before-seen, massive cloud of iron atoms. Astronomers aren’t sure why.
The cloud, which is in the shape of a bar, has slightly more mass than Mars. Astronomers spotted it using the William Herschel Telescope (WHT) in Spain using an optical spectrometer called the WHT Enhanced Area Velocity Explorer (WEAVE). The findings are detailed in a new paper in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
“When we processed the data and scrolled through the images, one thing popped out as clear as anything—this previously unknown bar of ionized iron atoms, in the middle of the familiar and iconic ring,” said Roger Wesson, an astronomer at Cardiff University in Wales and lead author of the new paper, in a statement.
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Roger Wesson et al/MNRAS
How the bar got there is a mystery. The bar is located somewhere in the middle of the nebula and is about as long as 500 times Pluto’s orbit around the sun. It’s possible that the bar could tell scientists more about how the nebula formed. The researchers plan to conduct a follow-up study with WEAVE to try and answer some of these questions.
Astronomers don’t know why it exists, but it likely is not the only one of its kind. “It would be very surprising if the iron bar in the Ring is unique,” Wesson said in the same statement. “So hopefully, as we observe and analyze more nebulae created in the same way, we will discover more examples of this phenomenon, which will help us to understand where the iron comes from.”