🌫️ Nebula
Southern Ring Nebula
A dying star’s shells of gas, among the first photos from the James Webb Space Telescope.
- Distance
- 2,500 light-years away
- Size
- 0.5 light-years across
Did you know?
- Webb released this picture in July 2022, in its first set of photos.
- The star at its centre has thrown off its outer layers, as our Sun will in billions of years.
Photographed or visited by
James Webb Space Telescope
A golden mirror that sees the first galaxies in infrared.
The life of a starA step in a star’s life: a shell of glowing gas
Compare Southern Ring Nebula with the Milky WaySide by side, to scale, in the app
More NASA photos of Southern Ring NebulaStraight from NASA’s image library, in the app
Explore more
All of deep space
The Sun
Our star, an ordinary one that keeps everything here alive.
Betelgeuse
A red supergiant in Orion that will one day explode.
Alpha Centauri
The closest star system to the Sun.
Eta Carinae
A pair of giant stars, one of them about 90 times heavier than the Sun.
Mira
A red giant star racing through space with a tail like a comet.
Zeta Ophiuchi
A runaway star, flung out when its partner exploded.