The universe is, indeed, full of wonders, and the James Webb Space Telescope has given us the best views yet of one of them. The object in question is a star 5,600 light-years away, and Webb’s infrared eye spotted an unusual detail: It appears to be surrounded by concentric rings of light radiating outward.
Although the characteristic web diffusion spikes are not ‘real’, they are concentric circles, and there is a surprising and fascinating explanation for them.
The star is actually a binary pair of rare stars in the constellation Cygnus, and their interactions produce periodic explosions of dust that have been expanding into layers over time in space around the pair. These dust layers glow in the infrared, allowing sensitive instruments like Webb’s MIRI to resolve them in great detail.
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The star is what’s known as a colliding wind binary, consisting of an extremely rare wolf’s right star, known as WR 140, and a hot and massive O-type stellar companion, another rarity. Wolf-Rayet stars are extremely hot, exceptionally splendid, and extremely old.
At the end of his life, his main order. They are significantly depleted of hydrogen, rich in nitrogen or carbon, and lose mass at a very high rate. O-type stars are among the most massive stars known, also very hot and luminous. Because they are so large, their lifespan is incredibly short.
Both stars in the WR 140 system have fast stellar winds, hurtling through space at about 3,000 kilometers (1,864 miles) per second. So both are losing mass at a dizzying rate. So far so common for both stars. Where it gets interesting is its orbit, which is elliptical.
This means that the stars don’t describe nice, sharp circles around each other, but rather ellipses, with a point where they are furthest from each other (apastron) and a point where they are one. ). When two stars enter peristron, a distance about a third of the distance between Earth and the Sun,
they get so close that their powerful winds collide. This creates shocks in the material surrounding the stars, accelerating particles and producing energetic radiation, such as X-rays. These colliding winds also influence dust-forming events as material from the colliding stellar wind cools.
This cycle should be visible in the movement underneath, which shows what the framework will resemble start to finish.
The residue is a type of carbon that retains bright light from the two stars. This heats the dust, causing it to re-emit thermal radiation, seen by the web in infrared wavelengths. The dust is then blown away by the stellar wind, resulting in partial dust layers.
They expand and cool as they are expelled, losing heat and density. What you see on the web image is like a series of bubbles. The edge of each dust layer is more visible because you are seeing a higher density of material due to perspective. Because the orbital period of a binary star is 7.94 years,
the wind collision and dust production occurs like clockwork every 7.94 years. This means you can count the nebula’s rings around the binary, like tree rings, to determine the age of the outermost dust layer. About 20 rings are visible, meaning about 160 years of dust layers can be seen in Webb’s image.
The last periastron WR 140 was seen in 2016. Webb’s observation of WR140 was commissioned by a team led by astrophysicist Ryan Lau of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Institute of Space and Astronautical Sciences.
They are preparing a paper on the observations, so we may be about to discover something new about this interesting and crazy star.
