A new mystery about the colorful Ring Nebula has once again attracted attention in space.
A huge bar of iron has been discovered lurking in the iconic Ring Nebula.
The structure is enormous, hundreds of times the size of Pluto’s orbit, and contains a Mars-sized amount of iron.
Researchers have seen a large cloud of iron atoms in the shape of a rod from Earth’s perspective; it looks like a ring, although it is believed that it actually looks more like a cylinder of material that we see at the end.
The iron bar was discovered by a team using the William Herschell Telescope (WHT) at the Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos, on the island of La Palma, Spain, together with a new instrument called WEAVE (WHT Enhanced Area Velocity Explorer).
About Ring Nebula:
The Ring Nebula, a beautiful celestial structure in our neighborhood of the Milky Way Galaxy.
According to researchers, it consists mainly of hydrogen and helium, with small amounts of heavier elements,” Wesson said.
Previously, it was first discovered by French astronomer Charles Messier in 1779 and has been extensively studied since then.
According to researchers, there are about 3,000 such nebulae known in our Milky Way.
Studying them allows astronomers to investigate the life stage of stars, when chemical elements formed by nuclear processes in the stars are released into interstellar space to be recycled and contribute to the next generation of stars and planets.
“We look forward to getting more data to follow up on this discovery, to try to unravel this new problem and figure out where the iron rod comes from,” Wesson said. He hovered over the surface of the nebula, a glowing shell of gas and dust emitted from a dying star, for about 6 trillion kilometers, searching for an explanation.
The Ring Nebula, also known as Messier, is a ‘planetary nebula’.
They are the glowing remains of what was once a Sun-like star, which ran out of fuel for nuclear fusion and shed its outer layers as its core collapsed, forming a dense stellar remnant called a white dwarf.
How exactly this iron bar came to be remains a mystery to Wesson and colleagues.
One possibility is that this is related to how the star ejected its outer layers and how this process occurred.
Alternatively, the formation of this arc of iron plasma could be the result of the Ring Nebula’s doomed star vaporizing an orbiting rocky planet as its outer layers swelled.
“We definitely need to know more, especially whether other chemical elements coexist with the newly detected iron, as this would likely tell us the right model class to pursue,” said team member and UCL astronomer Janet Drew.
“The discovery of this fascinating, previously unknown structure in a jewel of the night sky, beloved by skywatchers in the Northern Hemisphere, demonstrates the astonishing capabilities of WEAVE,” said Scott Trager, WEAVE project scientist at the University of Groningen. “We look forward to many more discoveries with this new instrument.”
That could mean discovering whether other planetary nebulae such as the Ring Nebula also contain unexpected structures.
“It would be very surprising if the iron rod in the Ring Nebula were unique,” Wesson concluded. “So hopefully, as we observe and analyze more nebulae created in the same way, we will discover more examples of this phenomenon, which will help us understand where the iron comes from.”
The research was published in the journal Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society on Thursday January 15, 2026.
