NASA on Wednesday, released a new image from the James Webb Space Telescope of dust rings, looking like a “fingerprint” where two stars are interacting with each other.
The new image reveals a remarkable cosmic sight: at least 17 concentric dust rings emanating from a pair of stars. Located just over 5,000 light-years from Earth, according to CTV News.
The duo is collectively known as Wolf-Rayet 140. A Wolf-Rayet star is an O-type star, born with at least 25 times more mass than our Sun, that is nearing the end of its life.
When it collapses, it will form a black hole. Burning hotter than in its youth, a Wolf-Rayet star generates powerful winds that push huge amounts of gas into space. Some other Wolf-Rayet systems form dust, but none is known to make rings as Wolf-Rayet 140 does.
The two stars in Wolf-Rayet 140 produce shells of dust every eight years that look like rings. Each ring is created when the stars come close together and their stellar winds collided, compressing the gas and forming dust.
According to NASA, astronomers say there should be a few thousand Wolf-Rayet stars in our galaxy, however, only about 600 have been found to date. So getting to see this image is really great.
“Even though Wolf-Rayet stars are rare in our galaxy because they are short-lived as far as stars go, it’s possible they’ve been producing lots of dust throughout the history of the galaxy before they explode and/or form black holes,” said Patrick Morris, an astrophysicist at Caltech in Pasadena, California, and a co-author of the new study. “I think with NASA’s new space telescope we’re going to learn a lot more about how these stars shape the material between stars and trigger new star formation in galaxies.”
What is so extraordinary about the Wolf-Rayet system is how it can transform gas into dust. NASA describes it somewhat like turning flour into bread. Actually, if you think about it, hydrogen, the most common element found in stars, can’t make dust on its own.
But because Wolf-Rayet stars shed so much mass, they also eject more complex elements typically found deep in a star’s interior, including carbon. So, those heavier elements in the winds cool as they travel in space, and are then compressed where the winds from both stars meet, like when two hands knead dough.
The stars’ orbits bring them together once every eight years, the rings captured in the photo are like rings on a tree trunk marking the passage of time. And this is important data that NASA can use as evidence that Wolf-Rayet stars produce “carbon-rich dust molecules.”
Wolf-Rayet stars may seem exotic compared to our Sun, but they may have played a role in star and planet formation. When a Wolf-Rayet star clears an area, the swept-up material can pile up at the outskirts and become dense enough for new stars to form. There is some evidence the Sun formed in such a scenario.
