Researchers at the Faculty of Physics at the Technion present surprising discoveries regarding the development of the rings around the "Southern Ring Nebula"
Professors Muhammad Akasha and Noam Soker from the Technion Physics Faculty present with their colleagues from Great Britain and Australia new findings concerning the Southern Ring Nebula. The main discovery: the rings in the nebula were formed by four or five stars and not by two stars as in most other cases.
Planetary nebulae are formed as a result of the death of stars like our Sun. A star is a ball of gas that produces energy in the process of nuclear fusion. Its shape is determined by the interplay between gravity, which pulls the gas to the center of the sphere, and fusion, which creates outward pressures. When the elements required for the fusion process run out, the influence of gravity increases and the star shrinks into a "white dwarf"; At the same time, the outer shell of the star is thrown into space and creates a gas cloud about the size of a light year. The gas cloud is called a planetary nebula. Our sun is also expected to form a planetary nebula in about 6 billion years.
The Southern Ring Nebula, or by its scientific name NGC 3132, is part of the Milky Way, and its distance from Earth is about 2,500 light years. According to the accepted hypothesis, most planetary nebulae are formed from pairs of stars, but the new research indicates that in the interesting case of the Southern Ring Nebula, four and possibly even five stars were involved. Two of the stars are visible in the telescope images. The other three stars have not yet been observed, and their existence was deduced from the calculations of the Technion researchers and their colleagues.
The discovery is based on modeling of recent data from the James Webb Space Telescope in the infrared And it was published in the journal Nature Astronomy.
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