Hubble Captures a Ring

This close-up, visible-light view by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope reveals new details of the Ring Nebula.

The object is tilted toward Earth so that astronomers see the ring face-on. The Hubble observations reveal that the nebula's shape is more complicated than astronomers thought. The blue gas in the nebula's center is actually a football-shaped structure that pierces the red doughnut-shaped material. Hubble also uncovers the detailed structure of the dark, irregular knots of dense gas embedded along the inner rim of the ring. The knots look like spokes in a bicycle. The Hubble images have allowed the research team to match up the knots with the spikes of light around the bright, main ring, which are a shadow effect.

The Ring Nebula is a well-known planetary nebula, the glowing remains of a Sun-like star. The tiny white dot in the center of the nebula is the star's hot core, called a white dwarf.

The nebula is about 2,000 light-years away in the constellation Lyra. The structure measures roughly one light-year across.

The Hubble observations were taken Sept. 19, 2011, by the Wide Field Camera 3. In the image, the deep blue color in the center represents helium; the cyan color of the inner ring is the glow of hydrogen and oxygen; and the reddish color of the outer ring is from nitrogen and sulfur.

About the colours

Blue: F469N (He II) + F487N (H-beta) Blue/green: F502N ([O III]) Green: F645N (continuum) Green/yellow: F656N (H-alpha) Red: F658N ([N II]) Orange: F673N ([S II])

About the data

The image was created from Hubble data from proposal 12309 : C. R. O'Dell (Vanderbilt University), G. Ferland (University of Kentucky), and W. Henney and M. Peimbert (UNAM).