Ring Nebula
What is Ring Nebula?
Nebulae· Distance 2,300 ly. The easiest planetary nebula for a small telescope, floating like a smoke ring between two stars of Lyra next to Vega. We are looking down the barrel of a shell shed by a dying star.
📍 Visible from where you are right now — computed in your browser
bearing · altitude · rise time · best time tonight
Where Ring Nebula is in your sky right now: https://nowsky.org/solar/sky?sel=ring nebula — location and time set automatically, no login.
Its place in the sky
A nebula, in the direction of Lyra, spanning about 1.4 arcminutes of sky — 0 times the width of the full Moon.
Distance and scale
| Distance | ~2,300 ly |
|---|---|
| Size | ~1 ly across |
| Type | planetary nebula |
| Constellation | Lyra |
Figures are representative approximations. Source: compiled from NASA and IAU public data.
Discovery and name
Found by Darquier in 1779, who called it "as large as Jupiter" — the origin of the term planetary nebula.
Frequently asked
- How far is Ring Nebula from Earth?
- ~2,300 ly.
- What kind of object is Ring Nebula?
- planetary nebula.
- Where in the sky is Ring Nebula?
- In the direction of Lyra.
- Where is Ring Nebula in the sky right now?
- Open the sky view for your location and time and it shows the position in the sky right now.
The ring as Webb saw it — 20,000 globules and ten arcs
When Webb imaged the Ring Nebula in infrared in 2023, the smooth-looking ring broke up into some 20,000 tiny globules, each a clump of molecular hydrogen and dust about the mass of Earth, formed as the shell the star shed was shredded by its hot light. The hot inner gas and the cold outer globules appeared in the same picture.
More unexpected were ten concentric arcs beyond the ring. Spaced regularly at about one every 280 years, they were read as the work of a companion star orbiting the central star and stirring the material at that period while the shell was being shed. If the Ring's central star has a partner, that is a step toward explaining why planetary nebulae take such varied shapes, and these arcs are the first case of reading a companion's orbital period from a nebula's pattern.
The nebula in depth
The Ring Nebula (M57) was discovered in 1779 by Antoine Darquier, and Messier described it as "a dull nebula the size of a planet's disk" — the origin of the term "planetary nebula", though it has nothing to do with planets. A shell of gas about one light-year wide is expanding at roughly 20 km/s some 2,300 light-years away.
The ring shape is a matter of viewpoint. The true form is closer to an open-ended barrel or doughnut, and we are looking straight down its axis. The central white dwarf, a faint 15th-magnitude star, needs a large telescope, but its ultraviolet light makes the shell's oxygen glow green and the outer hydrogen red. In 2023 the James Webb telescope resolved thousands of knots inside the ring.
In the Sky view, find Vega overhead on summer evenings, then look between the two southern stars of the small parallelogram beneath it (Beta and Gamma Lyrae). At 9th magnitude it looks star-like in binoculars; a 10-cm telescope at high power shows a crisp ring. It is one of the few nebulae you can enjoy even from a city.
Related
Figures are representative approximations. Simulated positions use J2000 mean elements.