New observations from the James Webb Space Telescope are providing an unprecedented look at the Red Spider Nebula, a dying star casting off its outer layers in a complex and symmetrical display. The images, captured with Webb’s powerful infrared camera, reveal the full extent of the nebula’s vast, spider-like lobes of gas and offer the strongest evidence yet that the intricate structure is being sculpted not by one, but two central stars.
Known formally as NGC 6537, the Red Spider Nebula is a planetary nebula, the glowing remnant of a star similar to our Sun that has exhausted its fuel. As the star shed its outer layers, its intensely hot and dense core, known as a white dwarf, began to irradiate the expelled gas, causing it to glow. Webb’s observations pierce through obscuring dust to reveal the mechanisms, including powerful jets and a likely binary star system, that give the nebula its signature hourglass shape, providing a detailed preview of the fate that awaits our own solar system in billions of years.
Anatomy of a Cosmic Spider
The latest images expose the full scale of the nebula’s most striking features: its two enormous, opposing lobes of gas that form the spider’s “legs.” For the first time, Webb’s wide field of view has captured these structures in their entirety, revealing them to be closed, bubble-like regions. Each lobe stretches approximately three light-years from the center, a colossal distance that dwarfs our solar system. These lobes are traced by the glow of molecular hydrogen, which is inflated by continuous outflows of gas that have been streaming from the central star for thousands of years. The resulting structure is a delicate, filamentary web that demonstrates the powerful forces at play in the final stages of a star’s life.
The Engine at the Nebula’s Heart
At the center of the cosmic web lies a white dwarf, the superheated core of the original star. While past observations from telescopes like the Hubble Space Telescope showed this star as a faint, blue point, Webb’s infrared sight tells a different story. The Near-InfraRed Camera (NIRCam) reveals the star glowing red, enveloped in a shroud of hot dust that was previously invisible. Scientists believe this dust is organized into a disk orbiting the white dwarf.
A Hidden Stellar Partner
While only one star is directly visible, the nebula’s pinched, hourglass shape strongly implies the presence of a second, hidden companion star. Such bipolar structures are difficult to explain with a single central star. A binary star system at the nebula’s core would create the gravitational dynamics needed to channel the ejected gas and dust into a narrow waist while allowing it to expand dramatically outwards along the poles. This mechanism is suspected in other planetary nebulae with similar shapes, such as the Butterfly Nebula, and the new data from the Red Spider provides compelling evidence for this theory.
Sculpting Gas with Stellar Jets
The new Webb images also reveal direct evidence of active and violent sculpting within the nebula. A distinct, S-shaped feature composed of ionized iron is now visible, tracing a high-velocity jet erupting from the central region. This jet, likely powered by the interactions between the two central stars, is slamming into previously ejected material that was cast off by the star at an earlier, slower phase. The collision creates shockwaves that ripple through the nebula, carving the intricate textures seen in the glowing gas walls. This interplay between slow- and fast-moving outflows is fundamental to creating the complex morphologies of planetary nebulae.
A Multi-Telescope Collaboration
The groundbreaking imagery is part of a larger research effort to understand the formation of bipolar planetary nebulae. The findings, led by researchers at the Rochester Institute of Technology, were published in The Astrophysical Journal. The study combines the new infrared data from Webb with observations from other premier observatories to create a more complete picture of the nebula’s physics. Data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) provided additional information about the high-energy environment and cooler gas components within the structure. This multi-wavelength approach allows scientists to simultaneously study the different materials and energetic processes that shape the object.
A Glimpse Into a Star’s Final Act
Planetary nebulae are a beautiful but brief phase in the life of intermediate-mass stars like the Sun, typically lasting only a few tens of thousands of years before the material dissipates into space. The process begins when a star exhausts the hydrogen fuel in its core and swells into a red giant. Eventually, its outer layers drift away, leaving behind the hot, dense core. The intense ultraviolet radiation from this exposed core energizes the surrounding gas cloud, creating the glowing spectacle of the nebula. Studying objects like the Red Spider Nebula allows astronomers to better understand the final chapter of stellar evolution, offering a preview of the eventual transformation our own Sun will undergo.