The James Webb telescope recorded the death throes of a distant star

The James Webb Space Telescope has captured stunning images of the final stages of a distant star's life with extraordinary precision and detail. The donut-shaped celestial body is about 2.600 light-years away from us.

High-resolution images released by an international team of astronomers reveal the donut-shaped structure of the planetary nebula called the Ring Nebula, or Messier 57.

It is a well-known object, located in the constellation Lyra, about 2.600 light-years away from Earth, RTS reports.

The nebula formed when a dying star ejected much of its material into space, producing vividly colored rings, expanding bubbles, and interweaving thin clouds. A similar fate awaits our Sun when "its time runs out", in billions of years.

High-resolution images captured by the James Webb Telescope's Infrared Camera (Nircam) show not only the structure of the nebula's expanding envelope but also the inner region around its central white dwarf, a very dense star about the size of a planet.

Although they have nothing to do with planets, such celestial bodies are known as planetary nebulae. The term is a holdover from the early days of astronomy when scientists armed with small telescopes thought they looked like planets.

"Stars like the Sun are expected to end their lives as white dwarfs by shedding their outer envelopes, which then form beautiful planetary nebulae lit by their hot central stars," said Michael Barlow, emeritus professor of physics and astronomy at University College London, who led the expert team.

The colorful bands in the nebula are created by chemical elements that emit light at different wavelengths, reports RTS.

Astronomers hope that by analyzing the images, they will gain new knowledge about the complex processes that create the structures of nebulae, as well as the life cycles of stars and the elements they eject into the cosmos.

"We do not yet fully understand all the processes that occur during this stage, which resembles the transformation of a caterpillar into a butterfly. The Ring Nebula in Lyra is one of the closest and brightest of these planetary nebulae and is therefore an ideal target for the James Webb telescope to study the process that lead to the formation of the dusty molecular structures we see in these images," Professor Barlow emphasized.