Ring Nebula

At a glance

Key points

We look down the axis of a distorted doughnut.

• A Sun-like star's final act
• About 20,000 dense globules
• Arcs hint at a hidden companion

A preview of the Sun

In about five billion years the Sun will shed its outer layers the same way. The concentric arcs Webb saw suggest a companion star orbiting at roughly Pluto's distance from the central star.

How it was found

Antoine Darquier de Pellepoix spotted the Ring in 1779, and Charles Messier added it to his catalogue as M57 the same year. A few years later William Herschel grouped round, disc-like glows of this kind as 'planetary nebulae' because in small telescopes they looked like the discs of planets. The name stuck, although these objects have nothing to do with planets: they are the outer layers of dying stars.

Its real shape

A ring is what we see, not what is there. Hubble observations in 2013 showed a distorted doughnut of glowing gas with a rugby-ball-shaped region of thinner gas filling its hole, the whole structure tilted so that we look almost straight down one pole. Comparing those images with ones from 1998 showed the nebula expanding at more than 69,000 km/h, the inner material moving faster than the ring. It should keep growing for about another 10,000 years before fading.

What Webb added

Webb's August 2023 images split the main ring into about 20,000 dense clumps rich in molecular hydrogen, found a thin ring of carbon-bearing molecules called PAHs inside the main shell, and picked out about ten faint arcs beyond its edge. NIRCam traced the fine filaments of the inner ring, while MIRI, working at longer wavelengths, mapped the concentric features in the outer halo.

Observing it

M57 lies in Lyra, almost exactly halfway between Sheliak and Sulafat, the two stars at the base of the lyre, not far from brilliant Vega. At magnitude 8.8 it is invisible to the naked eye, but a small telescope shows a tiny grey smoke ring. The central star is far fainter and needs a large telescope. It is best placed on summer evenings for northern observers.

Missions

1. 2021–

   James Webb Space Telescope

   NASA / ESA / CSAActive

   Infrared observatory at Sun–Earth L2, about 1.5 million km from Earth.

   Mission page (opens in a new tab)

Related entries

• Helix NebulaThe nearest bright planetary nebula
• The SunG2V main-sequence star · 4.6 billion years old

Sources

1. ESA: ESA/Webb and Hubble views of the Ring Nebula (opens in a new tab)
2. ESA: ESA/Webb weic2320 (opens in a new tab)
3. NASA Science: Hubble Messier catalog: M57 (opens in a new tab)
4. NASA Science: Hubble reveals the Ring Nebula's true shape (2013) (opens in a new tab)

Last reviewed 10 Oct 2026 against these sources. Built from public NASA, ESA and JPL data; not affiliated with or endorsed by any agency.