The studio's statement was published on January 16 and is an impressive title, but even more impressive is its story, with a dark and sad turn, this story is of a planetary nebula, it is decided, of the rest of a star that was like the sun, but that died and that expelled its outer layers and in that expulsion of outer covers, which ended up creating this planetary nebula.
If they call planetary nebulae because when they began to discover they believed that they were planets, planets that roamed freely through space, they believed because they had spherical shapes and they did not know very well that they were, but they are not planets, they are the remains that the star expelled, the one in the specific image is the ring nebula, it does date back to 2,283 light years and was discovered in 1779 by the French astronomer Charles Messiar, which now contains The catalogue, for sure.
It is located in the constellation of Lyra, the iron bar thing is not my invention, it is what the researchers literally title their work, a work they did with the new WEAVE spectrograph installed in the William Hert telescope of the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory in La Palma, the Canary Islands and in whose construction the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands has participated, in fact, in this research that has been led by the University College of London and Cardiff University, they have also participated. Researchers from the Canary Islands Astrophysics Institute participated.
They have found a huge cloud of iron atoms that has a length of about 39,500 astronomical units. How long is that? So that we have a reference, in January 2026, as of today, Voyager 1 is approximately 170 astronomical units from the Sun, that is, that bar measures about 232 times that distance. If Voyager had to cross that bar from one end to the other, it would take 11,300 years to travel through that iron bar, but that is not the most amazing fact, or at least from my perspective, because if we put all that mass of iron together, we would have A planet comparable in mass to Mars, not a planet like Mars, but an iron ball with the mass of Mars, is quite impressive.
But there is a twist because the authors of this article point out that the way in which this “iron bar” was formed is currently a mystery, when stars like the sun die, in that final phase they expel their outer layers, it is a bit like trees in autumn that lose their mass of leaves, and those leaves end up scattered by the wind and end up serving as fertilizer for plants and other trees to emerge, stars like the sun happen to them, something similar happens to them, they lose their outer mass, their outer layers, but in those layers Outside there is gas, there is helium, but there is also oxygen, there is carbon, there is iron, there are many elements that are then necessary for new planets and new stars to form and for life to hypothetically emerge.
But finding an iron bar of these dimensions and with this concentration is very rare, in fact, it has never been found until now, it does not mean that more do not exist, but for the moment this would be the first, so the researchers for this strange mystery have two clues, the first is that it was an arc of extremely stretched plasma, the result of the evaporation of a rocky planet trapped in the process of expulsion of the nebula, that is, the nebula expanded, expelled those layers and in that process literally vaporized a entire planet.
Because to transform into iron atoms, in that cloud, in that bar formed of iron atoms with a mass similar to that of Mars, the entire exterior of that planet had to also be vaporized. Keep in mind that the cores of the planets, the rocky ones, above all, are metallic nuclei, so that planet had to be literally vaporized, transformed into atoms.
The core of the Earth has about three times the mass of Mars, so it would not be a planet as big as the Earth, Venus has a little less, it has its metallic core about twice the mass of Mars, it is a little smaller than the Earth, but it would not be a planet like Mars, so it would have to be a planet like Venus or a small one a little less, because it is not necessary either.
There are planets the size of Earth or the size of Venus that have a lower density, which means they have a smaller metallic core, so that planet could have been a planet larger than Mars, obviously, but perhaps a little smaller in size than Venus, a rocky planet that was completely destroyed and reduced to atoms, the hardest part, its metallic core, was reduced to iron atoms, which is what we are seeing in this "bar."
In conclusion, on a rocky planet, perhaps a little smaller than Venus, that orbited a star that was like the sun and that therefore had its 9,000 or 10,000 million years of existence and if there was a rocky planet, there would surely be more, imagine, perhaps there was one that could have had liquid water on its surface and could even have developed life, because we are talking about stars that were like the sun, of star systems that were like the sun, but that arose several billion from years before, and that in the end it evaporated in its atoms.
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