Using ESO's Very Large Telescope Interferometer, astronomers have discovered a disc of silicate dust at the heart of the Ant Nebula. The disc seems, however, too lightweight to explain how the nebula got its unique ant-like shape, with three nested pairs of bipolar lobes.

The image on the right shows a previously taken image of the Ant Nebula. The image on the left shows a model of the dusty disc produced with the more sensitive MID-infrared Interferometric instrument. The Ant Nebula is located about 5 000 light-years away, and at that distance, seeing this disk is comparable to sighting a two-story building on the moon.

The dust mass stored in the disc appears to be only one hundred thousandth the mass of the Sun, and is a hundred times smaller than the mass found in the bipolar lobes.

Astronomers are inclined to think that the large quantity of material in the lobes was caused by several large-scale events, triggered by a cool stellar companion. Solving the mystery will require more investigation of the hot central star and its probable companion, hidden from our view by the dusty disc.

--ESO and SPACE.com Staff

Credit:Stephane Guisard/ESO