{"id":628877,"date":"2026-04-25T00:00:10","date_gmt":"2026-04-25T00:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/628877\/"},"modified":"2026-04-25T00:00:10","modified_gmt":"2026-04-25T00:00:10","slug":"new-jwst-images-reveal-cosmic-question-marks-and-buckyballs-in-a-planetary-nebula","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/628877\/","title":{"rendered":"New JWST images reveal cosmic question marks and buckyballs in a planetary nebula"},"content":{"rendered":"

In 2010 astronomers made a marvelous discovery: buckyballs, also known as buckminsterfullerene<\/a> molecules, inside a planetary nebula that formed from a dying star. These are molecules composed of 60 carbon atoms, each of which are bonded to three neighboring atoms. The result is a soccer-ball-like shape composed of 20 hexagons and 12 pentagons. These molecules were initially confirmed to exist in 1985, and for years, scientists had thought they could be found in space. But the 2010 observations confirmed the theory. And now some of the same astronomers are back with new results from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) that could help shed even more light on how dying stars shape the cosmos.<\/p>\n

The nebula is called Tc 1, and it is about 10,000 light-years away from Earth, in the Ara constellation. The new JWST imagery reveals hot gas, which is depicted in blue, surrounded by relatively cooler gas, which is depicted in red. In the center is a white dwarf, the dense, compact core of a dying star. There the new images reveal an odd structure that resembles an upside down question mark. The origin of this structure is still a mystery, according to the astronomers.<\/p>\n

\u201cTc 1 was already extraordinary, as it was the object that told us buckyballs exist in space, but this new image shows us we had only scratched the surface,\u201d said Jan Cami, principal investigator of the new JWST project that looked at Tc 1 and lead author of the 2010 study<\/a> outlining the discovery of buckyballs in space, in a statement<\/a>. \u201cThe structures we\u2019re seeing now are breathtaking, and they raise as many questions as they answer.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Contrary to their name, planetary nebulas<\/a> don\u2019t have much to do with planets, though they were given that monicker because they resembled gas planets to early astronomers. Rather they are regions of cosmic gas and dust<\/a> that have exploded off the outer layers of dying stars that range in mass from 0.8 to eight suns.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs beautiful as this image is, for me it is first and foremost a dataset,\u201d said Charmi Bhatt, a Ph.D. candidate at Western University in Ontario, who was involved in the new research, in the same statement. \u201cThe sharpness and sensitivity of JWST are unlike anything I have worked with before. Structures that were completely invisible to us are now laid out with stunning clarity: the shells, the rays, the fine details in the outer halo. And crucially, through the integral field unit spectroscopy, we can now connect everything we see morphologically in the image directly to the chemistry and physics happening throughout the nebula. That combination is what makes this dataset so powerful.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the new images, the nebula\u2019s buckyballs are prominent, concentrated in the spherical shell immediately around the central dying star. The distribution of buckyballs and other molecules in the planetary nebula will help astrophysicists decipher how these structures evolve over time and know more about what chemistry fuels the cosmos.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe painstakingly measured the properties of the buckyballs throughout our dataset and then put together a map of where they all are,\u201d said Morgan Giese, another Ph.D. candidate at Western, who led the analysis, in the statement. \u201cFunnily enough, these microscopic hollow spheres are actually distributed in the shape of a hollow sphere as well. Buckyballs arranged like one giant buckyball. We\u2019re still working on why they\u2019re located here, but it\u2019s really fun to see all these small things pop up in our data.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In 2010 astronomers made a marvelous discovery: buckyballs, also known as buckminsterfullerene molecules, inside a planetary nebula that…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":628878,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[64,63,304815,269450,21907,3398,83394,128],"class_list":{"0":"post-628877","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-buckyballs","11":"tag-carbon-atoms","12":"tag-dying-star","13":"tag-james-webb-space-telescope","14":"tag-planetary-nebula","15":"tag-science"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/628877","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=628877"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/628877\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/628878"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=628877"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=628877"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=628877"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}