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Journalism of Courage
NASA has recently released a new image of NGC 6537, the Red Spider Nebula, showing features never seen before. In the image taken by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the nebula’s full lobes, highlighted in blue, are visible for the first time.
Each of these lobes appears as a closed, bubble-like structure, stretching roughly three light-years. The European Space Agency (ESA) has described the nebula — a giant cloud of dust and gases in space — as a “cosmic creepy-crawly,” because in the image, the lobes resemble spider-like “legs.”
Located about 3,000 light-years from Earth, the Red Spider Nebula is a remarkable planetary nebula. This celestial spectacle forms during the final stage of a star’s life, when it sheds its outer layers and leaves behind a shell of gas and dust.
NASA explains that the lobes are outlined by light emitted from molecular hydrogen (H₂), which consists of two bonded hydrogen atoms. Over thousands of years, gas escaping from the centre of the nebula has inflated these massive bubbles.
As a star similar to our Sun exhausts its fuel, it swells into a red giant and eventually sheds its outer layers into space. The exposed core then becomes a white dwarf, whose intense ultraviolet radiation causes the ejected material to glow, producing the vivid colours seen in planetary nebulae like this one.
The new Webb image was captured using NIRCam, JWST’s primary near-infrared instrument, designed for high-resolution imaging and spectroscopy across many astronomical studies.
Although only one star is directly observed at the centre, scientists believe there may be an unseen companion star. Its gravitational influence could help explain the nebula’s distinctive hourglass or “narrow waist and wide outflows” shape.
In essence, the Red Spider Nebula gives us a possible preview of what might happen to our own Sun in about 5 billion years: as the Sun runs out of fuel, it may also swell into a red giant, shed its outer layers, and produce a planetary nebula, leaving behind a white dwarf core. This cosmic process ultimately creates the glowing shells of gas and dust seen in objects like NGC 6537.
Moreover, NASA notes that other planetary nebulae, for instance, the Butterfly Nebula, also exhibit a similar hourglass or bipolar shape.
