Scientists Identify ‘Astronomy’s Platypus’ with NASA’s Webb Telescope - UNIVERSE

After combing through NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s archive of sweeping extragalactic cosmic fields, a small team of astronomers at the University of Missouri says they have identified a sample of galaxies that have a previously unseen combination of features. Principal investigator Haojing Yan compares the discovery to an infamous oddball in another branch of science: biology’s taxonomy-defying platypus.

“It seems that we’ve identified a population of galaxies that we can’t categorize, they are so odd. On the one hand they are extremely tiny and compact, like a point source, yet we do not see the characteristics of a quasar, an active supermassive black hole, which is what most distant point sources are,” said Yan.

The research was presented in a press conference at the 247th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Phoenix. 

Image A: Galaxies in CEERS Field (NIRCam image)

Four of the nine galaxies in the newly identified “platypus” sample were discovered in NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science Survey (CEERS). One key feature that makes them distinct is their point-like appearance, even to a telescope that can capture as much detail as Webb.

Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, Steve Finkelstein (UT Austin); Image Processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI)

“I looked at these characteristics and thought, this is like looking at a platypus. You think that these things should not exist together, but there it is right in front of you, and it’s undeniable,” Yan said.

The team whittled down a sample of 2,000 sources across several Webb surveys to identify nine point-like sources that existed 12 to 12.6 billion years ago (compared to the universe’s age of 13.8 billion years). Spectral data gives astronomers more information than they can get from an image alone, and for these nine sources it doesn’t fit existing definitions. They are too far away to be stars in our own galaxy, and too faint to be quasars, which are so brilliant that they outshine their host galaxies. Though the spectra resemble the less distant “green pea” galaxies discovered in 2009, the galaxies in this sample are much more compact.

“Like spectra, the detailed genetic code of a platypus provides additional information that shows just how unusual the animal is, sharing genetic features with birds, reptiles, and mammals,” said Yan. “Together, Webb’s imaging and spectra are telling us that these galaxies have an unexpected combination of features.”

Yan explained that for typical quasars, the peaks in their characteristic spectral emission lines look like hills, with a broad base, indicating the high velocity of gas swirling around their supermassive black hole. Instead, the peaks for the “platypus population” are narrow and sharp, indicating slower gas movement. 

While there are narrow-line galaxies that host active supermassive black holes, they do not have the point-like feature of the sample Yan’s team has identified.

Image B: Galaxy CEERS 4233-42232: Comparison With Quasar Spectrum

This graphic illustrates the pronounced narrow peak of the spectra that caught researchers’ attention in a small sample of galaxies, represented here by galaxy CEERS 4233-42232. Typically, distant point-like light sources are quasars, but quasar spectra have a much broader shape.

Illustration: NASA, ESA, CSA, Joseph Olmsted (STScI)'

Has Yan’s team discovered a missing link in the cosmos? Once the team determined that the objects didn’t fit the definition of a quasar, graduate student researcher Bangzheng Sun analyzed the data to see if there were signatures of star-forming galaxies.

“From the low-resolution spectra we have, we can’t rule out the possibility that these nine objects are star-forming galaxies. That data fits,” said Sun. “The strange thing in that case is that the galaxies are so tiny and compact, even though Webb has the resolving power to show us a lot of detail at this distance.”

One proposal the team suggests is that Webb, as promised, is revealing earlier stages of galaxy formation and evolution than we have ever been able to see before. It is generally accepted across the astronomy community that large, massive galaxies like our own Milky Way grew by many smaller galaxies merging together. But, Yan asks, what comes before small galaxies? 

“I think this new research is presenting us with the question, how does the process of galaxy formation first begin? Can such small, building-block galaxies be formed in a quiet way, before chaotic mergers begin, as their point-like appearance suggests?” Yan said.

To begin answering that question, as well as to determine more about the nature of their odd platypuses, the team says they need a much larger sample than nine to analyze, and with higher-resolution spectra. 

“We cast a wide net, and we found a few examples of something incredible. These nine objects weren’t the focus; they were just in the background of broad Webb surveys,” said Yan. “Now it’s time to think about the implications of that, and how we can use Webb’s capabilities to learn more.”

The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb is solving mysteries in our solar system, looking beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probing the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).

To learn more about Webb, visit: https://science.nasa.gov/webb  

Source: Scientists Identify 'Astronomy’s Platypus' with NASA’s Webb Telescope - NASA Science

Antarctic ice melt can change global ocean circulation, sediment cores suggest - Earth - Earth Sciences - Environment

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

A new study shows that during the last two deglaciations, i.e., the transition from an ice age to the warm interglacial periods, meltwater from the Antarctic ice sheet intensified stratification in the Southern Ocean. The results highlight the key role of the Antarctic ice sheet on ocean circulation and the regulation of the global climate. The study was led by François Fripiat, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry and the Université Libre de Bruxelles, and was conducted in collaboration with researchers from Princeton University and the Alfred Wegener Institute. It is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Over the past 3 million years, Earth's climate has alternated between long glacial periods—during which immense polar ice sheets covered much of the Northern Hemisphere, extending as far as the European continent—and warmer interglacial periods. The transitions between these two states, known as deglaciations, were marked by gradual ice sheet disappearance.

"While the impact of melting large Northern Hemisphere ice sheets on North Atlantic circulation has been studied for decades and is recognized for its major climatic consequences, the specific role of Antarctica in the Southern Ocean that surrounds it remains largely unknown," explains Fripiat.

The Southern Ocean occupies a central place in the global climate system. It represents a true crossroad of ocean circulation, it connects the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans. It is also the main exchange zone between the atmosphere and the deep ocean—a vast reservoir that stores about one hundred times more carbon dioxide than the atmosphere.

These exchanges depend largely on ocean stratification, that is, the way water masses are organized into layers that are more or less well mixed. "The ocean can be compared to a huge machine that redistributes heat and carbon on a planetary scale. When this machine becomes stratified, its operation slows down, with direct consequences for climate," explains Fripiat.

Diatoms as a climate archive

For the study, the researchers analyzed sediment cores taken from the Southern Ocean. Their data are based on the isotopic composition of organic matter preserved in the shells of diatoms. These microscopic marine algae are found in large numbers in the Southern Ocean sediments and serve as a natural archive of past environmental conditions.

Impact of ice-sheet melt on ocean mixing

The results show that during deglacial periods, ocean stratification intensified strongly near Antarctica, driven by large inputs of freshwater from ice-sheet melting. At the same time, farther north near the polar front, the combined action of these freshwater inputs and the westerly winds promoted enhanced upwelling of deep waters, maintaining a certain degree of ocean ventilation on a global scale.

"Our data show that the climate system did not completely grind to a halt. Even when the ocean near Antarctica became more stratified, other mechanisms still allowed deep waters to rise and exchange with the atmosphere, notably under the influence of winds. These exchanges may have released CO₂ into the atmosphere, contributing to the warming that ended ice ages," explains Fripiat.

Far from being a simple icy desert, Antarctica thus appears as one of the invisible conductors of Earth's climate system. Understanding its mechanisms means better anticipating the planet's future. 

Provided by Max Planck Society 

by Claudia Dolle, Max Planck Society

edited by Lisa Lock, reviewed by Robert Egan 

Source: Antarctic ice melt can change global ocean circulation, sediment cores suggest 

Basic research on Listeria bacteria leads to unique cancer therapy - Biology Cell & Microbiology - Biotechnology

The Listeria lifecycle after it infects a mammalian host. Counterclockwise from upper left, the bacteria are quickly ingested by an immune system cell called a macrophage, where they end up in an organ called the phagosome for digestion. But they escape the phagosome and enlist a protein called actin to build a needle-like protrusion and push it through the cell wall into a neighboring cell, starting the cycle over again. The Listeria strain used for cancer therapy is unable to co-opt actin and thus cannot infect other cells to cause illness. Credit: Creative Commons License 3.0, courtesy of the American Society for Cell Biology

After nearly 40 years of research on how Listeria bacteria manipulate our cells and battle our immune system to cause listeriosis, Daniel Portnoy and his colleagues have discovered a way to turn the bacteria into a potent booster of the immune system—and a potential weapon against cancer.

Three years ago, Portnoy cofounded a startup, Laguna Biotherapeutics, that worked with scientists in his University of California, Berkeley lab to eliminate the bacteria's ability to cause disease while retaining its ability to rev up production of a type of immune system cell associated with increased survival in cancer patients. These so-called gamma delta T cells are general-purpose killers of cancer cells or any cell infected by a pathogen—bacteria, virus, or fungus.

Laguna Bio will soon ask the FDA for clearance to evaluate the therapy in children with leukemia who have received unmatched bone marrow transplants. Stanford University Medical Center doctors hope that the engineered Listeria will boost gamma delta T cells in pediatric patients and help them stave off graft-versus-host disease, fight potentially deadly infections that take advantage of a transplant patient's compromised immune system, and prevent the cancer from returning.

Portnoy and his colleagues foresee a broader application of this Listeria therapy, which is unique among cancer therapies in stimulating the body's innate immune system to eliminate essentially any cell that puts out a distress signal indicating it's been compromised. Today's immunotherapies for cancer typically activate the "adaptive" immune system, boosting cells that recognize and kill cancer cells.

"The issue is that tumors are a suppressive environment, and so the immune system isn't really even working," said Portnoy, a UC Berkeley professor of molecular and cell biology and of plant and microbial biology. "There are lots of attempts to try to reawaken the immune system, such as using checkpoint inhibitors, which were originally developed at UC Berkeley. The idea is somewhat similar with Listeria: Listeria itself is seen as foreign and induces an innate immune response, which allows the body to overcome the suppression."

Portnoy and his Berkeley and Laguna Bio collaborators recently published details of the successful use of the attenuated Listeria therapy in mice in the journal mBio. In another study posted last year on the bioRxiv preprint server, they reported that Listeria can also be engineered to boost another type of innate immune cell—mucosal-associated invariant T cell, or MAIT—that helps defend against infections and possibly cancer.

"What we're doing is based on decades of literature, chief among them Dr. Portnoy's work, showing that Listeria generates a really unique immune response," said Laguna Bio CEO Jonathan Kotula. "We believe that if you want to generate a comprehensive immune response, you need to carefully orchestrate the entire immune system. And attenuated Listeria seems to be doing that."

Escape from the phagosome

Listeria monocytogenes is a foodborne pathogen that causes gastrointestinal disease and fever in some people but occasionally spreads from the intestines to cause deadly sepsis or meningitis. Researchers have documented how, after infection, the bacteria are engulfed by scavenger cells called phagocytes, where they are captured by an organelle called a phagosome that digests invaders. But Portnoy showed nearly 40 years ago that before that can happen, the bacteria escape the phagosome and set up shop in the cell interior, hiding out from the host's immune system until they reproduce and spread to infect new cells.

Even though Listeria can hide from the immune system, it does trigger the adaptive immune system to make so-called cytotoxic T cells, or CD8 T cells, which can kill Listeria-infected cells. In the 2000s, Portnoy teamed up with a company called Aduro Biotech to develop a cancer treatment using Listeria engineered to express cancer antigens designed to induce the adaptive immune system to also target a specific tumor.

He first had to construct a version of Listeria that would not make people sick, which he did by deleting two genes required for the bacteria to exit a cell and spread. The bacteria normally do this by hijacking host cell actin, a protein from the cell's cytoskeleton, and using it to construct finger-like protrusions, which are internalized by neighboring cells.

"We found that a strain that was unable to nucleate actin will still get into the cytosol of cells, still grow and induce a potent immune response, but since it doesn't spread, it's a thousandfold less virulent," Portnoy said.

Aduro combined this strain—dubbed LADD, for Listeria attenuated double deleted—with a cancer antigen and used it to treat nearly 1,000 patients with pancreatic cancer and mesothelioma. But the therapy—essentially a vaccine against cancer—didn't work as well in humans as it did in mice, in part because humans failed to mount a robust cytotoxic T cell response like mice. Aduro eventually halted the trials and merged with another company in 2020.

An observation by his colleagues at Aduro got Portnoy thinking about using Listeria as a general immune system booster. They observed that in people, Listeria not only induced cytotoxic T cells but also other T cells of the innate immune system, which can target other pathogens, not just Listeria. After the disappointing results with LADD therapy, he decided to pursue this new approach.

The Laguna Bio therapy is an improvement on LADD in that two additional genes have been deleted to make it even safer in humans. Dubbed QUAIL, for quadruple attenuated intracellular Listeria, the strain lacks two enzymes—discovered by Portnoy and former graduate student Rafael Rivera Lugo—required to synthesize essential nutrient cofactors derived from riboflavin, or vitamin B2.

These co-factors, known as FMN and FAD, are readily available inside cells, making the bacteria's own enzymes unnecessary. But the cofactors are not available outside the cell, so the quadruple-attenuated Listeria cannot grow extracellularly. In essence, Portnoy converted Listeria from a pathogen that can grow both inside and outside of cells to one that is restricted to the intracellular environment.

"We said, 'Oh my gosh, this strain fits the criteria that we were looking for'—a mutant of Listeria that could grow inside of cells but not outside of cells," Portnoy said. "We have a strain that can't grow in blood, it can't grow in the intestine, it doesn't grow in the gallbladder—these are all extracellular sites for growth—but it grows inside of cells. So that's the new safer strain, QUAIL. We're very excited about that."

Cancer therapy and potential vaccine

The newly published study establishes the therapy's safety in mice and confirms that QUAIL retains a potency equivalent to LADD. Because of its inability to grow outside of cells, QUAIL, unlike LADD, cannot grow on the ports and implants often used to treat cancer patients.

One thing that the Aduro human trials showed is that LADD, while not producing much of a boost in cytotoxic T cells of the adaptive immune system, did induce gamma delta T cells of the innate immune system. Since those Aduro trials, gamma delta T cells have been shown to attack and kill cancer cells themselves, as well as produce cytokines that rev up a number of general-purpose immune cells, like macrophages and natural killer (NK) cells, to fight infection and cancer. QUAIL could potentially rev up those gamma delta T cells in patients.

"Taking all that body of data that existed before from Aduro allowed us to go forward with this plan that I think is really unique in that it's informed by robust human data," Kotula said.

In initial trials in pediatric leukemia patients, Laguna Bio plans to use QUAIL directly to elicit a gamma delta T cell response. The idea is that the T cells will fight infection, rejection, and recurrence by directly killing leukemic cells in a patient where the T cells of the adaptive immune system have been suppressed to prevent rejection of the transplant.

Should QUAIL prove safe and effective in the Stanford trials, Kotula envisions treatments for other diseases—multiple myeloma, lymphomas, neuroblastoma, sarcomas, and various solid tumors—that have been shown to respond to increased gamma delta T cells. The therapy might also work prophylactically as a vaccine against diseases like malaria, tuberculosis, and latent viral infections caused by intracellular pathogens.

"Let's reinvigorate the immune system, initially focusing on cancers where just that reinvigoration—the gamma delta T cells—has shown promise of efficacy against disease," Kotula said. "Then, once you have that reinvigoration, it's always helpful to direct it somewhere.

"I think this can be a part of a broad array of therapies and a piece of a treatment regimen that fits well within how a lot of immune therapies are being administered today. It really works well and complements a lot of the immunotherapy drugs that are already approved." 

Provided by University of California - Berkeley 

by Robert Sanders, University of California - Berkeley

edited by Lisa Lock, reviewed by Robert Egan 

Source: Basic research on Listeria bacteria leads to unique cancer therapy 

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Hubble Spies Stellar Blast Setting Clouds Ablaze - UNIVERSE

Jets of ionized gas streak across a cosmic landscape from a newly forming star.

NASA, ESA, and B. Reipurth (Planetary Science Institute); Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America)

This new NASA Hubble Space Telescope image captures a jet of gas from a forming star shooting across the dark expanse. The bright pink and green patches running diagonally through the image are HH 80/81, a pair of Herbig-Haro (HH) objects previously observed by Hubble in 1995. The patch to the upper left is part of HH 81, and the bottom streak is part of HH 80.

Herbig-Haro objects are bright, glowing regions that occur when jets of ionized gas ejected by a newly forming star collide with slower, previously ejected outflows of gas from that star. HH 80/81’s outflow stretches over 32 light-years, making it the largest protostellar outflow known. 

Protostars are fed by infalling gas from the surrounding environment, some of which can be seen in residual “accretion disks” orbiting the forming star.  Ionized material within these disks can interact with the protostars’ strong magnetic fields, which channel some of the particles toward the pole and outward in the form of jets. 

As the jets eject material at high speeds, they can produce strong shock waves when the particles collide with previously ejected gas. These shocks heat the clouds of gas and excite the atoms, causing them to glow in what we see as HH objects.

HH 80/81 are the brightest HH objects known to exist. The source powering these luminous objects is the protostar IRAS 18162-2048. It’s roughly 20 times the mass of the Sun, and it’s the most massive protostar in the entire L291 molecular cloud. From Hubble data, astronomers measured the speed of parts of HH 80/81 to be over 1,000 km/s, the fastest recorded outflow in both radio and visual wavelengths from a young stellar object. Unusually, this is the only HH jet found that is driven by a young, very massive star, rather than a type of young, low-mass star. 

The sensitivity and resolution of Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 was critical to astronomers, allowing them to study fine details, movements, and structural changes of these objects. The HH 80/81 pair lies 5,500 light-years away within the Sagittarius constellation.

New images added every day between January 12-17, 2026! Follow @NASAHubble on social media for the latest Hubble images and news and see Hubble's Stellar Construction Zones for more images of young stellar objects. 

Source: Hubble Spies Stellar Blast Setting Clouds Ablaze - NASA Science 

One of the ocean's saltiest regions is freshening: What it means for circulation - Earth - Earth Sciences - Environment

Salinity, current and current trend. Credit: Nature Climate Change (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41558-025-02553-1

The southern Indian Ocean off the west coast of Australia is becoming less salty at an astonishing rate, largely due to climate change, new research shows.

In a study published in Nature Climate Change, researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder and colleagues report that over the past six decades, rising temperatures have reshaped global wind patterns and ocean currents, bringing increasing amounts of fresh water into the southern Indian Ocean.

The changes could alter the interactions between the ocean and the atmosphere, disrupt major ocean circulation systems that help regulate climates around the world, and potentially affect marine ecosystems.

"We're seeing a large-scale shift of how freshwater moves through the ocean," said Weiqing Han, professor in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences. "It's happening in a region that plays a key role in global ocean circulation."

On average, seawater has a salinity of about 3.5%, roughly equivalent to dissolving one and a half teaspoons of table salt in a cup of water. But across an expansive region stretching from the eastern Indian Ocean into the western Pacific Ocean in the Northern Hemisphere tropics, surface waters are naturally less salty. Frequent tropical rainfall brings large amounts of freshwater to the region, while evaporation is relatively low.

This area, known as the Indo-Pacific freshwater pool, is associated with a giant "conveyor belt" of ocean circulation that redistributes heat, salt and freshwater around the planet. Known as the thermohaline circulation, this system channels warm, fresh surface waters from the Indo-Pacific flow toward the Atlantic Ocean, contributing to the mild climate in western Europe.

In the northern Atlantic Ocean, the water cools, becomes saltier and denser, and eventually sinks before flowing southward in the deep ocean back to the Indian and Pacific oceans.

Rapid freshening off western Australia

Over the past six decades, observational data has detected changes in salinity in the southern Indian Ocean off the southwest coast of Australia. The area is typically dry, with evaporation largely exceeding precipitation. As a result, the seawater in the region has historically been salty.

Han and her team calculated that the area of salty seawater has decreased by 30% over the past six decades, representing the most rapid increase in fresh water observed anywhere in the Southern Hemisphere.

"This freshening is equivalent to adding about 60% of Lake Tahoe's worth of freshwater to the region every year," said first author Gengxin Chen, visiting scholar in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences and senior scientist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences' South China Sea Institute of Oceanology.

"To put that into perspective, the amount of freshwater flowing into this ocean area is enough to supply the entire U.S. population with drinking water for more than 380 years," he said.

How climate change is driving the shift

The freshening is not a result of local precipitation changes. Using a combination of observations and computer simulations, the team found that global warming is altering surface winds over the Indian and tropical Pacific oceans. These wind shifts are pushing ocean currents to channel more water from the Indo-Pacific freshwater pool to the southern Indian Ocean.

As seawater becomes less salty, its density decreases. Because fresher water usually sits on top of saltier, denser water, the surface water and deep ocean water become more separated into layers. These stronger contrasts in salinity between layers reduce vertical mixing, an important process that normally allows surface waters to sink and deeper waters to rise, redistributing nutrients and heat throughout the ocean.

Risks for ocean circulation and life

Previous studies have suggested that climate change could slow part of the thermohaline circulation, as melting from the Greenland Ice Sheet and Arctic sea ice adds freshwater to the North Atlantic, disrupting the salinity balance needed for the conveyor belt to keep moving. The expansion of the freshwater pool could further influence this system by transporting fresher water into the Atlantic.

Reduced mixing could also impact marine ecosystems. When nutrients from deeper waters fail to reach the sunlit surface, organisms living in shallow waters have less food. Weaker mixing also prevents excess heat in the surface waters from dissipating into deeper layers, making shallow waters even hotter for organisms already under stress from rising temperatures.

"Salinity changes could affect plankton and sea grass. These are the foundation of the marine food web. Changes in them could have a far-reaching impact on the biodiversity in our oceans," Chen said. 

Provided by University of Colorado at Boulder 

by University of Colorado at Boulder

edited by Sadie Harley, reviewed by Robert Egan 

Source: One of the ocean's saltiest regions is freshening: What it means for circulation   

Mysterious iron 'bar' discovered in famous nebula - Astronomy & Space - UNIVERSE

A composite RGB image of the Ring Nebula (also known as Messier 57 and NGC 6720) constructed from four WEAVE/LIFU emission-line images. The bright outer ring is made up of light emitted by three different ions of oxygen, while the "bar" across the middle is due to light emitted by a plasma of four-times-ionised iron atoms. North is up and East is to the left in the image. Credit: University College London

A mysterious bar-shaped cloud of iron has been discovered inside the iconic Ring Nebula by a European team led by astronomers at University College London (UCL) and Cardiff University.

The cloud of iron atoms, described for the first time in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, is in the shape of a bar or strip: it just fits inside the inner layer of the elliptically shaped nebula, familiar from many images including those obtained by the James Webb Space Telescope at infrared wavelengths.

The bar's length is roughly 500 times that of Pluto's orbit around the sun and, according to the team, its mass of iron atoms is comparable to the mass of Mars.

The Ring Nebula, first spotted in 1779 in the northern constellation of Lyra by the French astronomer Charles Messier, is 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.

An illustrative set of 8 individual WEAVE LIFU emission-line images of the Ring Nebula. The colour in each panel tracks the brightness of emission, with brown-red being the most intense, shading through yellow and green to blue for the faintest emission. North is up and east, left. Credit: University College London

Discovery and analysis using WEAVE

The iron cloud was discovered in observations obtained 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 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."

Unanswered questions and future research

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: 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 are working on a follow-up study, and plan to obtain data using WEAVE's LIFU at higher spectral resolution to better understand how the bar might have formed.

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, led by Professor Drew, is observing many more ionized nebulae across the northern Milky Way.

"It would be very surprising if the iron bar in the Ring is unique," explains Dr. Wesson. "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." 

Provided by Royal Astronomical Society 

by Sam Tonkin, Royal Astronomical Society

edited by Gaby Clark, reviewed by Robert Egan 

Source: Mysterious iron 'bar' discovered in famous nebula