How the sun will look when it DIES: NASA image gives a glimpse at what’s in store for our home star (but don’t worry, we’ve got at least 5 billion years left)

This awe-inspiring image captures the final stages of a distant star’s life and offers a preview of what will happen to our own sun in about 5 billion years.

It was taken by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and reveals new features of the spectacular doughnut-like structure of glowing gas known as the Ring Nebula.

The mesmerizing object, also known as Messier 57, is located about 2600 light-years away from Earth and was born of a dying star expelling its outer layers into space.

It is this expulsion of stellar material that gives the cosmic masterpiece its distinct structure and vibrant colors.

A similar image taken by Webb was made public earlier this month, but the new one, taken with a different camera at the $10bn (£7.4bn) observatory, has revealed never-before-seen details in the outer reaches of the ring .

‘This striking image from James Webb’s MIRI reveals new details that we couldn’t see with the NIRCam – particularly the arcs beyond the main ring,” said Professor Mike Barlow of University College London, the chief scientist of the JWST Ring Nebula Project.

These formed in the red giant phase of the central star before it shed most of its material to become the current hot white dwarf star.

“Early analyzes by our team suggest that a low-mass companion star with an eccentric orbit caused an amplified release of material from the dying star as it passed close every 280 years, creating these arcs.”

Together, Webb’s images reveal the intricate structures of the Ring Nebula — the rings, bubbles and wispy clouds — in unprecedented detail.

The nebula’s main ring consists of 20,000 clumps of dense molecular hydrogen gas, each about the mass of Earth.

But just beyond this outer edge of the main ring, Webb’s MIRI (Mid-InfraRed Instrument) image has revealed for the first time that there are about 10 concentric arcs.

Astronomers say these must have formed about every 280 years.

However, no known process involved in the evolution of a star into a nebula has such a time period, so the arcs are believed to have been formed by the interaction of the dying red giant with a companion star that is the same distance from it as Pluto comes from our own sun.

Dr. Roger Wesson, from Cardiff University, said: ‘Our MIRI images gave us the sharpest and clearest image yet of the faint molecular halo outside the bright ring.

“A surprising revelation was the presence of up to ten regularly spaced, concentric features within this faint halo. No previous telescope had the sensitivity and spatial resolution to reveal this subtle effect.’

By analyzing the various images of the Ring Nebula, researchers hope to better understand the complex processes behind the formation and evolution of such objects.

Located in the constellation of Lyra, Messier 57 is popular among stargazers because even a small telescope will reveal the doughnut-like structure of glowing gas that gave it its name.

What makes planetary nebulae like this one so fascinating is their variety of shapes and patterns. These often include delicate, glowing rings, expanding bubbles, or intricate, wispy clouds.

Like fireworks, different chemical elements in the nebula emit light with specific colors.

This then results in beautiful and colorful objects, allowing astronomers to study the chemical evolution of these objects in detail.

Scientists believe that in five billion years our sun will have grown into a red giant star, more than 100 times larger than its current size.

Eventually it will eject gas and dust to create an “envelope” that represents as much as half of its mass.

The core will become a small white dwarf star that will shine for thousands of years, illuminating the envelope to create an annular planetary nebula like the Ring Nebula above.

This will likely wipe out any form of life on our planet, but whether Earth’s rocky core will survive is uncertain.

Webb was launched from Guyana Space Center on Christmas Day 2021 with the aim of looking back in time to the dawn of the universe.

Astronomers hope the observatory can reveal what happened just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.

The observatory will spend more than a decade in an area of ​​gravitational balance between the sun and Earth called L2.

While there, it will explore the universe in the infrared spectrum, allowing it to see through clouds of gas and dust where stars are being born.