‘Extreme stripping action’ led to the messy birth of the Southern Ring Nebula, Webb image reveals

NASA

When the first five images from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) were unveiled, one of them stared at me with two eyes. It was an image of the Southern Ring Nebula, NGC3132, and smack in the middle were two bright stars.

Now, the fact that NGC3132 houses a binary star system (two stars orbiting one another) has been known since the days of the Hubble Space Telescope.