A distant, mysterious glowing ring of gas and dust has finally given up its secrets \u2014 and it turns out to be less of a romantic cosmic jewel than its shimmering appearance suggests.<\/p>\n
In the constellation Cygnus<\/a>, a bright knot of stars seems to adorn one edge of a nearly perfect 20-light-year-wide circle, earning the structure the nickname “Diamond Ring<\/a>.” But astronomers studying its picturesque appearance say the luminous “diamond” isn’t part of the ring at all. Instead, it’s an unrelated cluster of young stars located a few hundred light-years closer to Earth that happens to lie along the same line of sight.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Using new observations and detailed 3D computer simulations, a team led by Simon Dannhauer<\/a> of the University of Cologne in Germany found the ring is the flattened wreckage of an expanding stellar bubble once inflated by the fierce radiation and winds of a massive young star. The team’s analysis<\/a> suggests the bubble expanded beyond the peculiar conditions of its natal cloud, causing it to “burst,” so to speak.<\/p>\n Best picks for you<\/p>\n “All that remained was the particular flat shape,” Dannhauer said in a statement<\/a>. “For the first time, we observed the final stage of such a gas bubble in a distinctly flat cloud structure.”<\/p>\n Most bubbles carved by massive stars expand more or less spherically<\/a>, showing red- and blue-shifted gas in telescope observations that signal their 3D shapes. But recent observations of the “Diamond Ring” from the now-retired SOFIA airborne observatory<\/a> lacked those telltale signatures, instead revealing only a thin, tilted ring of gas expanding significantly more slowly than similar structures, the new study reports.<\/p>\n