Astronomers Spot Mysterious Bar-Shaped Cloud of Iron Inside an Iconic Nebula
January 15, 2026
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Astronomers Spot Mysterious Bar-Shaped Iron Cloud Inside Iconic Nebula
A particular nebula inside the constellation Lyra is home to a never-before-seen cloud of iron atoms, and researchers aren’t sure why.
The Ring Nebula is a sight to behold. Located in the constellation Lyra, this kaleidoscopic donut of gas is the dying echo of a star not unlike our sun. And according to a new study, it also hosts a massive never-before-seen cloud of iron atoms. Astronomers don’t know why.
The bar-shaped cloud has a mass slightly greater than that of Mars. Astronomers spotted it using the William Herschel Telescope (WHT) in Spain using an optical spectrometer called the WHT Enhanced Area Velocity Explorer (WEAVE). The results are detailed in a new article in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
“As we processed the data and scrolled through the images, one thing became as clear as anything: this previously unknown bar of ionized iron atoms, in the middle of the familiar and iconic ring,” Roger Wesson, an astronomer at Cardiff University in Wales and lead author of the new paper, said in a statement.
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How the bar got there is a mystery. The bar is located somewhere in the middle of the nebula and is approximately as long as 500 times Pluto’s orbit around the sun. It’s possible the bar could tell scientists more about how the nebula formed. The researchers plan to conduct a follow-up study with WEAVE to try to answer some of these questions.
Astronomers don’t know why it exists, but it’s probably not the only one of its kind. “It would be very surprising if the iron bar of the Ring was unique,” Wesson said in the same statement. “So I hope that as we observe and analyze more similarly created nebulae, we will discover more examples of this phenomenon, which will help us understand where the iron comes from.”
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