Roughly 3,000 light-years from Earth sits one of the most complex and least understood nebulae, a whirling landscape of gas and dust left in the wake of a star’s death throes. A new computer visualization reveals the 3-D structure of the Cat’s Eye nebula and hints at how not one, but a pair of dying stars sculpted its complexity.
The digital reconstruction, based on images from the Hubble Space Telescope, reveals two symmetric rings around the nebula’s edges. They were likely formed by A spinning jet of charged gases that was launched from 2 stars in the nebula’s center, Ryan Clairmont and colleagues report in the October Monthly Notices of Royal Astronomical Society.
“I realized there hasn’t been a comprehensive study of the structure of the nebula since the early ’90s,” says Clairmont, an undergraduate at Stanford University. As a high-school student in San Diego, Clairmont reached out last year to Ilumbra scientists, who had created software that could reconstruct the 3-D structure astronomical objects.
The team combined Hubble images with ground-based observations of light in several wavelengths, which revealed the motions of the nebula’s gas. The 3-D structure was revealed by the team’s ability to identify which parts are moving towards and away from Earth.
The team identified two partial rings to either side of the nebula’s center. The rings’ symmetry and unfinished nature suggest they are the remains of a plasma jet launched from the heart of the nebula, then snuffed out before it could complete a full circle. According to Wolfgang Steffen (Ilumbra partner), such jets are often formed by interaction between two stars orbiting one other. He is based near Kaiserslautern in Germany.
The work Clairmont won a prize at 2021 International Science and Engineering FairThe Society for Science publishes the annual competition titled. Science News. Steffen was skeptical about the tight deadline — when Clairmont reached out, he had just two months to complete the project.
“I said that’s impossible! Not even Ph.D. students or anybody has tried that before,” Steffen says. “He did it brilliantly. He pulled it all off and more than we expected.”
