The aging pair of stars swing by one another once every 190 years, producing four spirals of dust.
The Webb telescope has unlocked a mystery in an exotic star system located approximately 8,000 light-years from Earth. Using its mid-infrared observation capabilities, the space telescope captured the first image of four swirling spirals of dust encircling two aging stars locked together in an orbital dance.
NASA released the image on Wednesday, confirming the existence of the layered shells of dust surrounding two Wolf-Rayet stars in the Apep system. Previous observations had only detected one dust spiral, while Webb was not only able to see all four, but it also narrowed down how long the binary stars take to orbit one another.
“Looking at Webb’s new observations was like walking into a dark room and switching on the light—everything came into view,” Yinuo Han, a researcher at Caltech in Pasadena, California, and lead author of a new study published in the Astrophysical Journal, said in a statement. “There is dust everywhere in Webb’s image, and the telescope shows that most of it was cast off in repetitive, predictable structures.”One of a kind
Wolf-Rayet stars are extremely rare, with only about a thousand of them believed to exist in the Milky Way galaxy.
