NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope Captures the Fingerprints of a Stellar Waltz

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has captured a striking image of a pair of stars surrounded by 17 wave-like rings. The star system is made up of two stellar bodies, one of which – known as a Wolf-Rayet star – is likely doomed to end its existence by collapsing into a super-dense black hole.

Wolf-Rayet stars live incredibly violent, and relatively short lives. They are born with a mass the equivalent to 25 times that of our Sun. However, over the course of tens of thousands of years, they forcefully expel much of their mass into the surrounding circumstellar environment. To date, roughly 600 of these rare stars have been discovered.

The JWST recently captured an image of the star system Wolf-Rayet 140, in which one of these mass shedding stars is orbiting in a binary system alongside a companion with a mass around 30 times that of our Sun.

When at their most distant, an expanse of 1.9 billion miles separates the two stars. However, once every eight years, their orbits bring the two enormous heavenly bodies to within a distance of just 93 million miles of each other – a little more than the average space between Earth and our home star.

At this point, fast flowing streams of particles blasting out from the surfaces of the stars – which collectively are known as stellar winds – slam into the mass of gas and carbon being cast off by the Wolf-Rayet.

This material is compressed and transformed into dust by the relentless onslaught of the stellar winds, thus creating the rings observed by the JWST in the present day. 

The authors of a new study, published in the journal Nature Astronomy, believe that the rings have been able to preserve their well defined shape thanks to the pressure of the stellar winds that created them, which effectively clear out any debris that could disrupt their structure.

Prior to being imaged by Webb, astronomers using ground-based telescopes had only been able to spot two dust rings surrounding the binary system. However, the keen infrared abilities of the JWST’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) – which is capable of observing relatively cool objects against the backdrop of space – revealed a more complete view of the scene. 

“We’re looking at over a century of dust production from this system,” comments lead author of the new study Ryan Lau, of the National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab. “The image also illustrates just how sensitive this telescope is. Before, we were only able to see two dust rings, using ground-based telescopes. Now we see at least 17 of them.”

According to Lau and his co-authors, the rings we see in the new image were likely created over the course of the roughly 130 years prior to the point that the light left the system. Each ring marks an eight year period, as reliable as a cosmic metronome.

However, this is probably not the full story of Wolf-Rayet 140, as there are likely fainter rings beyond the outer boundary that cannot be seen, even by the powerful gaze of NASA’s latest flagship telescope.

Anthony Wood is a freelance science writer for IGN.

Image Credit: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI/JPL-Caltech