JWST spots buckyballs and a mysterious question-mark structure in planetary nebula Tc 1
The James Webb Space Telescope has delivered a striking new view of the planetary nebula Tc 1, revealing a trove of complex carbon molecules known as buckyballs and an enigmatic feature that resembles an upside-down question mark near the nebula’s central star.
The observations, scientists say, could shed new light on how dying stars transform their surroundings. Captured with JWST’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) across nine filters spanning 5.6 to 25.5 microns, the image maps hotter gas in blue and cooler material in red—wavelengths well beyond human vision.
Tc 1 lies about 10,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Ara. At its heart sits a white dwarf, the dense remnant of a star that expelled its outer layers to form the glowing nebula. Close to that core, astronomers spotted the question-mark-like structure; its origin remains a mystery, according to the team.
“Tc 1 was already extraordinary, as it was the object that told us buckyballs exist in space, but this new image shows us we had only scratched the surface,” said Jan Cami, principal investigator of the new JWST project on Tc 1 and lead author of the 2010 study that reported buckyballs in space, in a statement.
“The structures we’re seeing now are breathtaking, and they raise as many questions as they answer.” Despite the name, planetary nebulas are not planets; early astronomers coined the term because these objects resembled gas giants in small telescopes. They form when stars roughly 0.8 to eight times the mass of the Sun shed their outer layers, creating intricate shells and halos of gas and dust.
“As beautiful as this image is, for me it is first and foremost a dataset,” said Charmi Bhatt, a Ph.D. candidate at Western University in Ontario involved in the research, in the same statement. Bhatt pointed to JWST’s sharpness and sensitivity and noted that integral field unit spectroscopy now links the image’s detailed structures—shells, rays, and the outer halo—directly to the chemistry and physics throughout the nebula.
The new images show buckyballs, or buckminsterfullerene molecules made of 60 carbon atoms, concentrated in a spherical shell immediately surrounding the central star. Their distribution, along with that of other molecules, will help astrophysicists trace how planetary nebulas evolve and what chemistry fuels the cosmos.
“We painstakingly measured the properties of the buckyballs throughout our dataset and then put together a map of where they all are,” said Morgan Giese, another Ph.D. candidate. Astronomers confirmed buckyballs in space in 2010 using Tc 1; JWST’s view suggests there is far more to learn.
For now, the question-mark-like feature near the white dwarf underscores how even the best images can deepen the mystery, setting the stage for further analysis of the nebula’s structure and chemistry.