The Fine Ring Nebula in the Norma Constellation | New Technology Telescope

The Fine Ring Nebula in the Norma Constellation | New Technology Telescope

The hazy and aptly named Fine Ring Nebula, shown here, is an unusual planetary nebula. Planetary nebulae form when dying stars, having expanded into a red giant phase, expel a shell of gas as they evolve into white dwarfs. Most planetary nebulae are either spherical or elliptical in shape, or bipolar (featuring two symmetric lobes of material).

Distance from Earth: ~2,500 light years

However, the Fine Ring Nebula—captured here by the European Southern Observatory's Faint Object Spectrograph and Camera mounted on the New Technology Telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile—looks like an almost perfect circular ring. Astronomers believe that these more unusually shaped planetary nebulae are formed when the progenitor star is actually a binary system. The interaction between the primary star and its orbiting companion shapes the ejected material.

The stellar object at the center of the Fine Ring Nebula is indeed thought to be a binary system, orbiting with a period of 2.9 days. Observations suggest that the binary pair is almost perfectly face-on from our vantage point, implying that the planetary nebula’s structure is aligned in the same way. We are looking down on a torus (doughnut shape) of ejected material, leading to the strikingly circular ring shape in the image.

Planetary nebulae are shaped by the complex interplay of many physical processes. Not only can these celestial objects be admired for their beauty, but the study of precisely how they form their striking shapes is a fascinating topic in astronomical research.

Norma is a small constellation in the Southern Celestial Hemisphere between Ara and Lupus, one of twelve drawn up in the 18th century by French astronomer Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille and one of several depicting scientific instruments. Its name is Latin for normal, referring to a right angle, and is variously considered to represent a rule, a carpenter's square, a set square or a level. It remains one of the 88 modern constellations.

This image was made using multiple filters: light observed through B and O-III filters is shown in blue, V is shown in green, R is shown in orange, and H-alpha in red. The image is approximately 200 arcseconds across.

Learn about the New Technology Telescope:
https://www.eso.org/public/teles-instr/lasilla/ntt/

Credit: European Southern Observatory (ESO)
Release Date: Aug. 1, 2011

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