Now, the James Webb Space Telescope has taken those observations further by delivering the most detailed infrared view ever captured of this familiar object.

A Preview of the Sun’s Distant Fate

Webb’s powerful instruments allow scientists to zoom deep into the Helix Nebula, offering a glimpse of what could eventually happen to our own Sun and planetary system. The telescope’s sharp infrared vision clearly reveals the structure of gas flowing away from a dying star. This material, once part of the star itself, is being returned to space, where it can later contribute to the formation of new stars and planets.

Images from Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) reveal dense pillars of gas that resemble comets with long trailing tails. These features outline the inner edge of an expanding shell of material. They form as fast-moving, extremely hot winds from the dying star slam into cooler layers of dust and gas that were released earlier in the star’s life. The collisions carve and sculpt the nebula, creating its intricate and textured appearance.

How Webb’s View Compares to Earlier Observations

Since its discovery nearly two centuries ago, the Helix Nebula has been observed by many telescopes. Webb’s near-infrared images bring small knots of gas and dust into much sharper focus than the soft, glowing view seen in images from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The new data also highlights a clear transition from the hottest gas near the center to much cooler material farther out, as the nebula continues to expand away from its central star.

At the center of the Helix Nebula is a white dwarf, the exposed core left behind after the star shed its outer layers. Although it sits just outside the frame of Webb’s image, its influence is unmistakable. Intense radiation from the white dwarf energizes the surrounding gas, producing a range of environments. Closest to the core is hot, ionized gas, followed by cooler regions rich in molecular hydrogen. Farther out, sheltered pockets within dust clouds allow more complex molecules to begin forming. These regions contain the basic materials that can eventually help build new planets in other star systems.

What the Colors in Webb’s Image Reveal

In Webb’s image, color is used to represent differences in temperature and chemical makeup. Blue tones indicate the hottest gas, energized by strong ultraviolet radiation. Yellow areas show cooler regions where hydrogen atoms bond together to form molecules. Along the outer edges, red hues trace the coldest material, where gas thins and dust begins to take shape. Together, these colors illustrate how a star’s final outflow becomes the raw material for future worlds, adding to Webb’s growing contributions to our understanding of how planets form.

The Helix Nebula lies about 650 light-years from Earth in the constellation Aquarius. Its relative closeness and striking structure have made it a favorite target for both amateur skywatchers and professional astronomers.

More Information About the James Webb Space Telescope

Webb is the largest and most powerful space telescope ever launched. As part of an international collaboration, ESA provided the launch service using the Ariane 5 rocket. ESA also oversaw the development and testing of Ariane 5 modifications for the mission and arranged the launch through Arianespace. In addition, ESA contributed the NIRSpec instrument and 50% of the mid-infrared instrument MIRI, which was designed and built by a consortium of nationally funded European Institutes (The MIRI European Consortium) working in partnership with JPL and the University of Arizona.

Webb is a joint project involving NASA, ESA, and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA).

Entanglement is often described as one of the most mysterious effects in quantum physics. When two quantum objects are entangled, measurements performed on them can remain strongly linked even when the objects are far apart. These unexpected statistical connections have no explanation in classical physics. The effect can appear as though measuring one object somehow influences the other at a distance. This phenomenon, known as the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox, was confirmed experimentally and recognized with the 2022 Nobel Prize in physics.

Using Distant Entanglement for Precision Measurements

Building on this foundation, a team led by Prof. Dr. Philipp Treutlein at the University of Basel and Prof. Dr. Alice Sinatra at the Laboratoire Kastler Brossel (LKB) in Paris demonstrated that entanglement between quantum objects separated in space can serve a practical purpose. Their work shows that spatially separated but entangled systems can be used to measure multiple physical parameters at once with improved precision. The results of the study were recently published in the journal Science.

“Quantum metrology, which exploits quantum effects to improve measurements of physical quantities, is by now an established field of research,” says Treutlein. Around fifteen years ago, he and his collaborators were among the first to entangle the spins of extremely cold atoms. These spins, which can be imagined as tiny compass needles, could then be measured more precisely than if each atom behaved independently without entanglement.

“However, those atoms were all in the same location,” Treutlein explains: “We have now extended this concept by distributing the atoms into up to three spatially separated clouds. As a result, the effects of entanglement act at a distance, just as in the EPR paradox.”

Mapping Fields With Entangled Atomic Clouds

This approach is especially useful for studying quantities that vary across space. For example, researchers interested in measuring how an electromagnetic field changes from place to place can use entangled atomic spins that are physically separated. As with measurements made at a single location, entanglement reduces uncertainty that arises from quantum effects. It can also cancel out disturbances that affect all of the atoms in the same way.

“So far, no one has performed such a quantum measurement with spatially separated entangled atomic clouds, and the theoretical framework for such measurements was also still unclear,” says Yifan Li, who worked on the experiment as a postdoc in Treutlein’s group. Together with colleagues at the LKB, the team studied how to minimize uncertainty when using entangled clouds to measure the spatial structure of an electromagnetic field.

To do this, the researchers first entangled the atomic spins within a single cloud. They then divided that cloud into three parts that remained entangled with one another. With only a small number of measurements, they were able to determine the field distribution with clearly higher precision than would be possible without entanglement across space.

Applications in Atomic Clocks and Gravimeters

“Our measurement protocols can be directly applied to existing precision instruments such as optical lattice clocks,” says Lex Joosten, PhD student in the Basel group. In these clocks, atoms are held in place by laser beams arranged in a lattice and serve as extremely precise “clockworks.” The new methods could reduce specific errors caused by how atoms are distributed within the lattice, leading to more accurate timekeeping.

The same strategy could also improve atom interferometers, which are used to measure the Earth’s gravitational acceleration. In certain applications, known as gravimeters, scientists focus on how gravity changes across space. Using entangled atoms makes it possible to measure these variations with greater precision than before.

The study found that even though only 2% of U.S. households use wood as their main source of heat, residential wood burning is responsible for more than one fifth of Americans’ winter exposure to outdoor fine particulate matter (PM_2.5).

These microscopic particles are small enough to travel deep into the lungs and enter the bloodstream. Long term exposure has been linked to serious health problems, including heart disease, lung disease, and premature death. Based on their analysis, the researchers estimate that pollution from residential wood burning is associated with about 8,600 premature deaths each year.

Urban communities face the greatest risks

One of the study’s most unexpected findings is where the greatest harm occurs. People living in cities are affected more than those in rural areas. The health impacts also fall disproportionately on people of color, who tend to burn less wood but experience higher exposure levels and greater health risks from wood smoke. The researchers point to higher baseline mortality rates and the lasting effects of past discriminatory policies as key factors behind this disparity.

The findings suggest that reducing wood burning inside homes could significantly lower outdoor air pollution, leading to major public health benefits and potentially saving thousands of lives.

The study was published on Jan. 23 in the journal Science Advances.

“Long-term exposure to fine particulate matter is associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular diseases,” said Northwestern’s Kyan Shlipak, who led the study. “Studies have shown consistently that this exposure leads to a higher risk of death. Our study suggests that one way to substantially reduce this pollution is to reduce residential wood burning. Using alternative appliances to heat homes instead of burning wood would have a big impact on fine particulate matter in the air.”

Why home wood burning is often overlooked

Wildfire smoke often dominates public attention, but pollution from everyday home heating rarely receives the same scrutiny.

“We frequently hear about the negative health impacts of wildfire smoke, but do not often consider the consequences of burning wood for heat in our homes,” said Northwestern’s Daniel Horton, the study’s senior author. “Since only a small number of homes rely on wood burning for heat, facilitating a home-heating appliance transition to cleaner burning or non-burning heat sources could lead to outsized improvements in air quality.”

Horton is an associate professor of Earth, environmental and planetary sciences at Northwestern’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, where he directs the Climate Change Research Group (CCRG). Shlipak is an undergraduate in mechanical engineering at Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering and a member of the CCRG.

Mapping pollution neighborhood by neighborhood

For decades, air quality research and regulation have focused mainly on emissions from vehicles, power plants, agriculture, industry, and wildfires. In this study, the researchers turned their attention to a less studied source of pollution: wood burning in homes, including furnaces, boilers, fireplaces, and stoves.

The team began by collecting residential wood burning data from the National Emissions Inventory (NEI), a detailed database maintained by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The NEI estimates emissions using information from household surveys, housing characteristics, climate conditions, and appliance types.

The researchers then applied a high resolution atmospheric model to simulate how pollution travels through the air. This model incorporates weather patterns, wind, temperature, terrain, and atmospheric chemistry to estimate changes in air quality over time.

“Wood burning emissions enter the atmosphere, where they are affected by meteorology,” Horton said. “Some emissions are considered primary pollutants, such as black carbon, and some interact with the atmosphere and other constituents, and can form additional, secondary species of particulate matter pollution.”

To identify detailed pollution patterns, the team divided the continental United States into a grid made up of 4 kilometer by 4 kilometer squares. For each grid square, they calculated how much pollution was produced each hour, how it moved through the air, and where it accumulated or dispersed. This approach allowed the researchers to pinpoint pollution hotspots that would not appear in broader city or county averages.

The model was run twice, once including residential wood burning emissions and once without them. By comparing the two results, the researchers determined that residential wood burning accounts for about 22% of wintertime PM_2.5 pollution. This makes it one of the largest single sources of fine particle pollution during the coldest months of the year.

Vulnerable populations bear the burden

The analysis showed that wood smoke pollution is especially harmful in urban and suburban areas, where population density, emissions patterns, and atmospheric movement combine to increase exposure. In many cases, smoke produced in suburban areas drifts into nearby city centers, where fewer homes burn wood but many more people live.

Cities that are not typically associated with wood burning can also be affected during cold snaps, recreational burning periods, and when smoke travels long distances through the atmosphere.

“Our results suggest that the impacts of residential wood burning are primarily an urban and suburban phenomenon,” Shlipak said. “This finding underscores the public health relevance of this pollution. We estimate that long-term exposure to emissions from wintertime wood burning is associated with approximately 8,600 deaths per year, and this estimate does not account for particulate matter exposures in other seasons.”

To understand who faces the greatest risks, the researchers combined their pollution estimates with U.S. census data and mortality statistics at the census tract level. They found that people of color experience higher exposure and greater health harms despite contributing less to wood burning emissions. In the Chicago metropolitan area, for example, Black communities face more than 30% higher adverse health effects from residential wood burning compared with the citywide average.

“While a lot of emissions from residential wood burning come from the suburbs, pollutants emitted into the air don’t typically stay put,” Horton said. “When this pollution is transported over densely populated cities, more people are exposed. Because people of color tend to be more susceptible to environmental stressors due to the long tail of past discriminatory policies, we estimate larger negative health outcomes for people of color.”

“People of color face both higher baseline mortality rates and higher rates of exposure to pollution from wood burning,” Shlipak said. “However, people of color are correlated with lower emissions rates, indicating that a large fraction of this pollution is transported to these communities, rather than emitted by them.”

The researchers note that the study focuses only on outdoor exposure to wood burning pollution. Health effects linked to indoor exposure to particulate matter were not included, even though they also pose serious public health risks.

The study, “Ambient air quality and health impacts of PM2.5 from U.S. residential wood combustion,” was supported by the National Science Foundation (award number CAS-Climate-2239834).