NASA: A rare type of star with 17 dust rings in a celestial dance

A new image released by NASA shows at least 17 rings of dust created by a rare type of star and a nearby companion star that appears to be participating in a celestial dance.

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The new image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope reveals a fascinating cosmic spectacle: at least 17 concentric rings of dust originating from a pair of stars.

The twin star is located just over 5,000 light-years from Earth, and is more commonly known as Wolf-Rayet 140.

Each ring was created when the two stars approached and their stellar winds (streams of gas blowing through space) met, compressing the gas and forming dust.

The orbits of the stars bring them together once every eight years.

Like rings growing on a tree trunk, dust indicates the passage of time.

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

The image also shows how sensitive this telescope is. Before that, we could only see two rings of dust using ground-based telescopes. Now we see at least 17 of them.”

In addition to Webb’s overall sharpness, the medium-infrared instrument (MIRI) is uniquely qualified to study dust rings — what Lau and colleagues call shells, because they are thicker and wider than they appear in the image.

Webb Scientific Instruments detects infrared radiation, a group of wavelengths invisible to the human eye.

MIRI detects the longest infrared wavelengths, which means it can often see cooler objects — including dust rings — than Webb’s other instruments.

The MIRI spectrometer also revealed the composition of the dust, which consists mostly of material ejected from a type of star known as a Wolf-Rayet star.

source: skai.gr

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