- The Southern Ring Nebula
looks as though a bomb dropped into an ocean.
Tsunami waves surging away into the darkness.
Cosmic light presented in the colors of a lapis stone
seems to fill a gaping crater in space.
NASA scientists, giddy to reveal the new image
from the James Webb Space Telescope
in an event earlier this month
beamed with delight.
"Here it is," they said, "A dying star."
It had sloughed its outermost layers,
a sea foam of molecular hydrogen.
But for the fatalists the world over
gazing into this planetary nebula
some 2,500 light years away,
may not have inspired celebratory feelings
rather a foreboding of what's to come.
It's easy to internalize
the story of the Southern Ring Nebula
as our sun's own destiny
written in well, the stars.
For the past six months, since Webb launched into space,
NASA has promised this telescope
would crack the universe wide open
with its penetrating vision and science capabilities
bringing humankind in on secrets of how it all began.
Astrophysicists who saw sneak previews
of the first images told reporters they had chills
or an ugly cry
as some of the very first galaxies to exist
popped into focus.
Yet, perhaps just as compelling as the origin story is,
the answer to how this all ends,
a dying star wheezes puff, puff, puff.
Each successive cloud ring withers the star to its core,
a white dwarf of carbon and oxygen.
It will grow cold.
Then the light goes out.
Unlike giant stars that explode into a supernova
and collapse into a black hole,
a medium star like the one creating a planetary nebula
runs out of nuclear fuel
and suffers a more tortured end.
"It's not just any star -
it's a star that's much like the sun,"
said Klaus Pontoppidan,
an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute
in Baltimore.
"...at least like the sun will be
in 5 billion years when the sun dies."
The photo, among the first released
from the $10 billion observatory in space
appears as if scientists happen to point the telescope
at just the right moment to catch a cataclysmic event.
And indeed the 10,000-or-so years of this phase
are but a moment relative to the 13.8 billion years
of the universe.
Finding it though, wasn't serendipity.
Astronomers have known about the Southern Ring Nebula,
aka NGC 3132, since before pasteurized milk.
As scientific knowledge advanced,
they came to better understand planetary nebulas,
a confusing misnomer because they don't actually
have anything to do with planets
as the death throws of medium-sized stars.
Scientists have discovered
a few thousand of them in the Milky Way.
The late British astronomer David S. Evans
even suspected in 1968
that this nebulas' core were actually two stars
though one would've to be concealed by gas and dust.
The revelation of Webb's photo, 54 years later
is the ability to see the dimmer star,
the true source of the nebula,
in full detail with the telescopes mid-infrared instrument.
NASA scientists marveled at the intricate detail on display.
On the outer edges are bright, straight pins of light.
Those are spotlights from the central stars
like those biblical representations of God,
sun beams pouring through parting clouds after a storm.
"The sun is about halfway to the Southern Ring's fate,"
said Paul Sutter,
Research Professor at Stony Brook University
and author of 'How To Die In Space.'
Researchers have estimated the age of the sun
by observing all sorts of stars at different intervals.
Think of it like taking snapshots of people
at different phases of life.
Babies being born, little league games, weddings, sickness,
and then death.
Those observations are combined with knowledge
of the physics going on in the sun's core.
Sutter said, "It turns out our sun is middle aged.
It's going through a midlife crisis right now.
It just bought a Corvette
and is worried about its retirement fund."
In astronomy,
looking farther translates into observing the past
because light and other forms of radiation
must travel incredible distances to reach us.
It's conceivable
that the Southern Ring light show is already over.
It's white dwarf no longer able to illuminate it.
But in all likelihood, it's probably ongoing
albeit fainter, says Rodolfo Montez
who studies dying sunlight stars
at the Center for Astrophysics Harvard and Smithsonian.
Through the Hubble Space Telescope,
Webb's visible light predecessor,
planetary nebula experts have found
so many irregular non-spherical shapes
among these celestial structures
influenced by a second central star
that they wonder if having the extra star
is actually a key ingredient for their creation.
"It's called a binary hypothesis, which would suggest
that only stars and binary systems make planetary nebulae.
But then we're not clear what single stars
like our sun would do in that framework."
Just another mystery for Webb to unravel.
The ripples
shed from the dying star in the Southern Ring Nebula
carry metals through space like spores.
Those last gasps will forge molecules
and germinate new objects in the cosmos.
Stars are element factories.
They make carbon, for instance,
the same chemical on which humans
and much of life on earth are based.
So are we sad about the star dying?
Pontoppidan gave an indirect response.
His answer was based on science,
but it sounded almost spiritual.
He said, "This is the end for the star
but it's the beginning for other stars
and for other planetary systems."