Iron bar of hot plasma revealed inside Ring Nebula

London, UK (SPX) Jan 19, 2026
Astronomers using a powerful new multi-object spectrograph on the William Herschel Telescope have uncovered a previously unknown bar-shaped cloud of ionised iron inside the famous Ring Nebula. The structure, described in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, stretches across the inner region of the nebula and contains a mass of iron atoms comparable to the mass of Mars. The Ri