{"id":116036,"date":"2020-11-19T10:00:59","date_gmt":"2020-11-19T18:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/11\/phantom-star-of-the-blue-ring-nebula-mystery-solved"},"modified":"2020-11-19T10:00:59","modified_gmt":"2020-11-19T18:00:59","slug":"phantom-star-of-the-blue-ring-nebula-mystery-solved","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/11\/phantom-star-of-the-blue-ring-nebula-mystery-solved","title":{"rendered":"\u201cPhantom Star of the Blue Ring Nebula\u201d \u2013Mystery Solved"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/phantom-star-of-the-blue-ring-nebula-mystery-solved.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe were in the middle of observing one night, with a new spectrograph that we had recently built, when we received a message from our colleagues about a peculiar object composed of a nebulous gas expanding rapidly away from a central star,\u201d said Princeton University astronomer <a href=\"https:\/\/web.astro.princeton.edu\/people\/gudmundur-stefansson\">Gu\u00f0mundur Stef\u00e1nsson<\/a>, a member of the team that discovered a mysterious object in 2004 using NASA\u2019s space-based <a href=\"http:\/\/www.galex.caltech.edu\/index.html\">Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX)<\/a>. \u201cHow did it form? What are the properties of the central star? We were immediately excited to help solve the mystery!\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>A 16-Year-Old Mystery<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>NASA announced today that it has solved the 16-year-old mystery of the object \u2013similar in size that of a supernova remnant\u2013unlike any they\u2019d seen before in our Milky Way galaxy: a large, faint blue cloud of gas in space with a living star at its center. Subsequent observations revealed a thick ring structure within it, leading to the object being named the Blue Ring Nebula.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cWe were in the middle of observing one night, with a new spectrograph that we had recently built, when we received a message from our colleagues about a peculiar object composed of a nebulous gas expanding rapidly away from a central star,\u201d said Princeton University astronomer Gu\u00f0mundur Stef\u00e1nsson, a member of the team that discovered [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,385],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-116036","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology","category-evolution"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116036","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=116036"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116036\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=116036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=116036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=116036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}