Wait, how many stars were there at the party? Maybe there were five, but now there are only two! The research team recently began examining highly detailed images of the Southern Ring Nebula taken by Webb to reconstruct the scene. Before this stunning planetary nebula formed, stars may have interacted with her two central star dimmers, appearing red in this image. The first star to "dance" with the party host created a light show that emitted beams of matter in opposite directions. It covered the faint star with a layer of dust before retreating. The same dancer, much smaller, may have merged with the dying star Ores now hidden in its brilliance. Third-party participants may have approached the central star several times. This star churned out the jets emitted by its first companion, helping to create the wavy shapes seen in today's gas and dust fringes. A fourth star was also added to the celebration: it orbited the scene, stirring up more gas and dust and creating the massive ring system seen outside the nebula. The fifth star is the best known. A bright white-blue star in the image, quietly orbiting as expected. The latest surprising result is an accurate measurement of the central star's mass before it ejected a layer of gas and dust. Researchers estimate that the star was about three times the mass of the Sun before it formed the planetary nebula, about 60% of the mass of the Sun after that. It's still early days. This is part of the first published research on some of Webb's first published images, so we're sure more details will come out in the future. The image on the right is a large, irregular pink and red oval with a star in the center and a wavy pattern extending around the rim. The full article contains two views of gas in the Southern Ring Nebula (NIR Cam and MRI composite images). The first data from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope showed that at least two and possibly three other invisible stars form the elongated, curved shape of the Southern Ring Nebula. And by combining Webb's infrared image with existing data from the European Space Agency's Gaia Observatory, researchers were able to accurately determine, for the first time, the mass of the star before it formed the nebula. A team of about 70 researchers, led by Orson De Marco at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, analyzed Webb's ten highly detailed images of the dying star. According to their calculations, the central star had nearly three times the mass of the Sun before expelling layers of gas and dust. Knowing the initial mass is key evidence to help the team reconstruct the scene and predict how this nebula's shape formed. Let us begin with the "party's" celebrities, the stars who have been shedding gas and dust for thousands of years. We approached the analysis much like a forensic scientist reconstructs a crime scene. It is common for small groups of stars containing a range of masses to coalesce and orbit each other as they age
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