Image: NASA’s Webb Captures Dying Star’s Final ‘Performance’ in Fine Detail

Description: This side-by-side comparison shows observations of the Southern Ring Nebula in near-infrared light (L) and mid-infrared light (R), from NASA’s Webb Telescope. The central star has a white dwarf orbiting it to the lower left. In the Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) image, the white dwarf is partially hidden by a diffraction spike. The same star appears – but brighter, larger, and redder – in the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) image. The images look very different because NIRCam and MIRI collect different wavelengths of light. NIRCam delivers higher-resolution images, while MIRI goes farther into the infrared and can see gleaming dust around the stars.

The white dwarf is cloaked in thick layers of dust, which make it appear larger. The brighter star in both images hasn’t yet shed its layers. It closely orbits the dimmer white dwarf, helping to distribute what it’s ejected. Over thousands of years and before it became a white dwarf, the star periodically ejected mass – the visible shells of material. Stellar material was sent in all directions – like a rotating sprinkler – and provided the ingredients for this asymmetrical landscape.

Today, the white dwarf is heating up the gas in the inner regions – which appear blue at left and red at right. Both stars are lighting up the outer regions, shown in orange and blue, respectively. In the circular region at the center of both images is a wobbly, asymmetrical belt of material. This is where two “bowls” that make up the nebula meet. (In this view, the nebula is at a 40-degree angle.) This belt is easier to spot in the MIRI image, as a yellowish circle, but is also visible in the NIRCam image. The light that travels through the orange dust in the NIRCam image – which look like spotlights – disappear at longer infrared wavelengths in the MIRI image.

In near-infrared light, stars have more prominent diffraction spikes because they are so bright at these wavelengths. In mid-infrared light, diffraction spikes also appear around stars, but they are fainter and smaller (zoom in to spot them).
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