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Iconic Ring nebula holds a mysterious iron bar, study finds

Iconic Ring nebula holds a mysterious iron bar, study finds

On a black background, the elliptical eye-shape of the Ring nebula, with yellowy-green around the outside, blue getting darker toward the middle, and a pinkish horizontal bar at the center. — This is the iconic Ring nebula, as seen by combining 4 images from the WEAVE/LIFU instrument on the William Herschel Telescope in the Canary Islands, Spain. The never-before-seen “bar” across the middle is due to light emitted by ionized iron atoms. Image via Royal Astronomical Society/ University College London.

The Royal Astronomical Society originally published this story on January 16, 2026. Edits by EarthSky.

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Iconic Ring nebula holds a mysterious iron bar, study finds

Astronomers at University College London (UCL) and Cardiff University have discovered a mysterious bar-shaped cloud of iron inside the iconic Ring nebula.

The cloud of iron atoms, described for the first time in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) on January 16, 2026, is in the shape of a bar or strip, and just fits inside the inner layer of the oval-shaped nebula.

The bar’s length is roughly 500 times that of Pluto’s orbit around the sun, and its mass is comparable to that of Mars.

How did it form? It’s a mystery, the astronomers say.

Discovering a hidden cloud in the Ring nebula

The French astronomer Charles Messier was the first to spot the Ring nebula in 1779. Lying in the northern constellation of Lyra the Harp, it’s a colorful shell of gas thrown off by a star as it ends the nuclear fuel-burning phase of its life. Our own sun will expel its outer layers in a similar way in a few billion years’ time.

Researchers discovered the iron cloud using the Large Integral Field Unit (LIFU) mode of a new instrument, the WHT Enhanced Area Velocity Explorer (WEAVE), installed on the Isaac Newton Group’s 4.2-meter (13.7 feet) William Herschel Telescope.

The LIFU is a bundle of hundreds of optical fibers. It has enabled the team of astronomers to obtain spectra (where light is separated into its constituent wavelengths) at every point across the entire face of the Ring nebula, and at all optical wavelengths, for the first time.

Lead author Dr Roger Wesson, based jointly at UCL and Cardiff University, said:

Even though the Ring nebula has been studied using many different telescopes and instruments, WEAVE has allowed us to observe it in a new way, providing so much more detail than before.

By obtaining a spectrum continuously across the whole nebula, we can create images of the nebula at any wavelength and determine its chemical composition at any position.

When we processed the data and scrolled through the images, one thing popped out as clear as anything: this previously unknown ‘bar’ of ionized iron atoms, in the middle of the familiar and iconic ring.

M57 - The Ring nebula — This Hubble telescope view of the Ring nebula is what we’re used to seeing. Image via The Hubble Heritage Team (AURA/STScI/NASA)

What created this iron bar?

How the iron bar formed is currently a mystery, the authors say. They will need further, more detailed observations to unravel what is going on. There are two potential scenarios: firstly, the iron bar may reveal something new about how the ejection of the nebula by the parent star progressed. Or, more intriguingly, the iron might be an arc of plasma resulting from the vaporization of a rocky planet caught up in the star’s earlier expansion.

Co-author Professor Janet Drew, also based at UCL, said:

We definitely need to know more – particularly whether any other chemical elements co-exist with the newly-detected iron, as this would probably tell us the right class of model to pursue. Right now, we are missing this important information.

The team is working on a follow-up study, and plans to obtain data using WEAVE’s LIFU at higher resolution to better understand how the bar might have formed.

8 images of the Ring nebula on a grid, most showing just the ring, 1 showing just a bar in the middle, and another showing a ball in the middle. The rings are mainly blue, with yellow and oranges at the upper and lower edges. — An illustrative set of 8 individual WEAVE LIFU images of the Ring nebula, each showing emissions from a different atom. The color in each panel tracks the brightness of the emission, with brown-red being the most intense, shading through yellow and green to blue for the faintest emission. Image via RAS/ University College London.

More to learn

WEAVE is carrying out eight surveys over the next five years, targeting everything from nearby white dwarfs to very distant galaxies. The Stellar, Circumstellar and Interstellar Physics strand of the WEAVE survey is observing many more similar ionized nebulae across the northern Milky Way.

Dr Wesson explained:

It would be very surprising if the iron bar in the Ring is unique. So hopefully, as we observe and analyze more nebulae created in the same way, we will discover more examples of this phenomenon, which will help us to understand where the iron comes from.

Professor Scott Trager, WEAVE Project Scientist based at the University of Groningen, added:

The discovery of this fascinating, previously unknown structure in a night-sky jewel, beloved by sky watchers across the Northern Hemisphere, demonstrates the amazing capabilities of WEAVE.

We look forward to many more discoveries from this new instrument.

Bottom line: Scientists have discovered a mysterious bar of iron hidden within the iconic Ring nebula. It’s not yet clear what created it.

Via RAS

Source: WEAVE imaging spectroscopy of NGC 6720: an iron bar in the Ring

The post Iconic Ring nebula holds a mysterious iron bar, study finds first appeared on EarthSky.

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