Overview
- Astronomers using WEAVE’s Large Integral Field Unit on the 4.2‑metre William Herschel Telescope mapped the Ring Nebula’s spectra and isolated strong [Fe V] 4227 Å emission from a thin, bar‑shaped cloud.
- The feature lies entirely within the nebula’s bright inner shell and concentrates an estimated iron mass comparable to that of Mars.
- Despite decades of study with Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescope, the bar went unnoticed until WEAVE provided continuous spectral coverage with dense spatial sampling.
- Proposed origins include an asymmetric burst of stellar ejecta or the vaporisation of a rocky planet, but researchers stress these scenarios remain unconfirmed.
- The team plans higher‑resolution WEAVE observations to measure velocity structure and element abundances and will search other planetary nebulae in forthcoming surveys to assess how common such iron‑dominated features are.