Overview
- The Cardiff–UCL-led team reported the finding in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society using the WEAVE Large Integral Field Unit on the William Herschel Telescope.
- The structure spans the nebula’s interior over a distance reported as roughly 500 times Pluto’s orbit—about four trillion miles—with total iron comparable to Mars’s mass.
- The feature appears as a narrow, ionised strip distinct from the nebula’s bright ring, revealed by element-by-element mapping across the full field rather than traditional imaging.
- Its origin is unresolved, with leading hypotheses pointing to asymmetric stellar ejecta during the nebula’s formation or the remains of a rocky planet that was vaporised.
- Researchers plan spectroscopy and velocity measurements to check composition and motion, and will apply the same technique to other planetary nebulae; the Ring lies about 2,300 light-years away and formed ~4,000 years ago.