Scientists have finally solved the mystery surrounding a bright blue ring of light that is unlike anything astronomers have seen before. Astronomers have been trying for years to understand why the mysterious object in space has a ring of blue light around it, analyzing images taken with telescopes both on the ground and in space.
Now scientists believe they have solved the mystery that has occupied them for 16 years regarding how the blue light was formed. Astronomers claim that the blue ring is not actually a ring but a cone.
The cloud of decaying debris likely formed after a sun-like star swallowed a smaller one, and because one of the cones faces directly at Earth, it appears from here as a ring.
This is the first time astronomers have observed such a rare phase of star evolution that occurs a few thousand years after their birth, and lasts only perhaps a few thousand years, a brief period in the scale of stars.
The two stars began their lives in space, but as the star expanded and approached the other star, the smaller of the two began to shed material from the larger. Eventually, as the smaller star was "eaten up," the collision launched a debris cloud that was bisected by a disk of gas from the smaller star—thus creating the two cone-shaped pieces of debris. The hydrogen molecules in the debris were then excited by the shock wave, causing them to glow with ultraviolet light, giving the cloud its circular blue color.
While scientists have been trying to figure out what caused the star to explode for years, they have come up with many theories about the phenomenon. Using Caltech's Hale Telescope at the Palomar Observatory near San Diego and the Keck Observatory in Hawaii, they have tried to find evidence of a wave around the star that suggests a cloud of gas was sent into space. Later, it was suggested that the star could have destroyed a nearby, unseen planet, but data from the Habitable Zone Planet Finder released in 2017 showed that there was no such object orbiting the star.
Although it took scientists a long time to figure out what causes the blue ring, using new technology, older programs also continue to reveal new information about such phenomena.
