NASA’s James Webb shared a fingerprint-like image from space. here what it is

Each ring formed when stellar winds from two stars approached each other, compressing the gas and producing dust. About every eight years, the stars’ orbits bring them closer together; Dust loops act as timekeepers, just like the growth rings on a tree trunk.

“We’re seeing more than a century of dust production from this system,” said an astronomer at NSF’s NOIRLab and lead author of a new study about the system, published today in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Turning gas into dust is somewhat like turning flour into bread: it requires specific conditions and ingredients. Hydrogen, the most common element found in stars, cannot form dust on its own. However, because Wolf-Rayet stars shed so much mass, they also expel more complex elements, such as carbon, that are commonly found inside a star. As when two hands knead the dough, the heavier elements in the air are compressed, where the winds from the two stars meet after cooling as they travel through space.

The James Webb Telescope Enhances NASA’s Capabilities

speaking of the ability James Webb Telescope In capturing minute details, Lau said, “The image also shows how sensitive this telescope is. Previously, we could only see two dust rings using ground-based telescopes. Now we see fewer of them.” Let’s look at 17 at least.”

On the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) Web, in addition to the telescope’s overall sensitivity, makes it uniquely suited for studying dust rings, or spheres, as Lau and his colleagues refer to them because they are thicker and wider than they appear in the image. . Infrared light, which has a spectrum of wavelengths that are invisible to the human eye, is detected by Webb’s scientific instruments.

Because of its ability to detect longer infrared wavelengths than Webb’s other instruments, MIRI is often able to see cold objects, including rings of dust. The composition of the dust, which was mostly composed of material ejected by a type of star called a Wolf-Rayet star, was also revealed by MIRI’s spectrometer.

About the Wolf-Rayet Stars

The Wolf-Rayet star is a dying O-type star that was born at least 25 times as massive as our Sun and is on the verge of collapsing into a black hole. The Wolf-Rayet star produces powerful winds that propel massive amounts of gas into space as it is hotter than it was when it was young. This process can cause the Wolf-Rayet star in this pair to lose more than half of its initial mass.

While some other Wolf–Rayet systems are known to produce dust, none are known to form rings. Since the orbit of the Wolf–Rayet star in WR 140 is elongated rather than circular, a characteristic ring pattern develops. Unless the stars are relatively close to each other—similar to the distance between Earth and the Sun—and their winds collide, the gas is not under enough pressure to form dust. Wolf-Rayet binaries can produce dust continuously when their orbits are circular.