Why A Giant Iron Bar Inside The Ring Nebula Could Reveal The Fate Of Earth

Smack dab in the Ring Nebula, astronomers have stumbled upon a massive bar-shaped structure of iron that had previously eluded prior observations, potentially revealing the ghost of a vaporized world.


This strip or bar of iron is quite staggering in scale, stretching across the nebula’s interior roughly 1,000 times the distance between the Sun and Pluto (3.7 trillion miles), with mass of the iron atoms estimated to be comparable to Mars. This narrow strip of ionized iron appeared "as clear as anything" when the data was processed, according to lead author Dr. Roger Wesson. The structure remained invisible for decades because previous observations focused on the nebula’s overall glow; it was only by mapping the light spectra (using WEAVE's Large Integral Field Unit) at every single point across the nebula that this specific chemical signature could be isolated.

It's still up in the air as to what the iron bar is, though. One theory suggests the iron is the remains of a rocky planet that was once part of the central star’s solar system. As the star ran out of fuel and bloated into a red giant, it likely engulfed and vaporized its inner planets. The iron bar could be the ashes of such a world, stretched into a long arc of plasma by the star’s final death throes.