Astronomers have captured a striking image of 17 dust rings that look like a fingerprints of a universe.
The formation was created by the interaction of two giant stars. When the stars pass close to each other, the rings are created. The gas from the stars is compressed into dust when the solar winds collide.
Prof Peter Tuthill is a study co-author and he said that the smoke ring is inflated in the stellar wind like a balloon. After eight years, another ring appears, the same as the one before, streaming out into space inside the bubble of the previous one.
A region of space larger than our own solar system was created by the 17-ring structure.
There is a big Wolf-Rayet star and a blue supergiant star in the WR140. A Wolf-Rayet is 25 times more mass than our Sun and is nearing the end of its stellar lifespan. Burning hotter than in its youth, a Wolf-Rayet star creates powerful winds that push huge amounts of gas into space, but it is thought to have lost half its mass through this process.
The winds from both stars meet at the boundary where carbon and heavy elements are compressed.
The wind from the other star sweeps the gas into lanes and you have enough of the material close together to form dust. This rare phenomenon shows new evidence about how dust can survive in harsh space environments.
New insights into how the first generation of stars seed their surroundings with dust and gas could be provided by the latest observations.
Nature Astronomy publishes the findings.
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