New James Webb Space Telescope images could shed fresh light on how dying stars evolve over time

By Adam Kovac edited by Claire Cameron

In 2010 astronomers made a marvelous discovery: buckyballs, also known as buckminsterfullerene 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.

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.

“Tc 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,” said Jan Cami, principal investigator of the new JWST project that looked at Tc 1 and lead author of the 2010 study outlining the discovery of buckyballs in space, in a statement. “The structures we’re seeing now are breathtaking, and they raise as many questions as they answer.”

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Contrary to their name, planetary nebulas don’t 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 that have exploded off the outer layers of dying stars that range in mass from 0.8 to eight suns.

“As beautiful as this image is, for me it is first and foremost a dataset,” said Charmi Bhatt, a Ph.D. candidate at Western University in Ontario, who was involved in the new research, in the same statement. “The 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.”

In the new images, the nebula’s 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.

“We painstakingly measured the properties of the buckyballs throughout our dataset and then put together a map of where they all are,” said Morgan Giese, another Ph.D. candidate at Western, who led the analysis, in the statement. “Funnily enough, these microscopic hollow spheres are actually distributed in the shape of a hollow sphere as well. Buckyballs arranged like one giant buckyball. We’re still working on why they’re located here, but it’s really fun to see all these small things pop up in our data.”