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- Title Ring Nebula
- Released 27/05/2013 9:00 am
- Copyright NASA, ESA, and C. Robert O'Dell (Vanderbilt University)
New view of the Ring Nebula (also known as Messier 57 or NGC 6720) by the Hubble Space Telescope.
From Earth’s perspective, the nebula looks like a simple elliptical shape with a shaggy boundary. However, new observations combining existing ground-based data with new NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope data show that the nebula is shaped like a distorted doughnut. This doughnut has a rugby-ball-shaped region of lower-density material slotted into in its central ‘gap’, stretching towards and away from us.