Webb telescope sees rare star duo rife with dust rings

The astronomer might have smudged a new deep space photo with his fingerprints.

The ridges are part of a new picture taken by the James Webb Space Telescope. The Wolf-Rayet 140 is a pair of stars 5000 light-years away from Earth.

There are 17 visible rings, each created when a pair of stars and their solar winds collide, according to NASA. Two of those rings are visible to telescopes on Earth.

Ryan Lau, an astronomer at the NOIRLab, was puzzled by what he saw in the preview images. I was worried that it was a visual effect created by the stars' extreme brightness.

Tweet may have been deleted

(opens in a new tab)

After seeing the data in its final form, Lau saw a lot of dust rings. Scientists use the dust to tell a story about the age of the tree. They are close every eight years. Dust has been produced for over a century.

The dust was made out of material that one would expect from a Wolf-Rayet star, according to an instrument on the Telescope. The Wolf-Rayet is 25 times larger than the sun. It burns hotter because it is close to collapsing into a black hole.

Sign up for more science and tech news. If you sign up for the newsletter, you'll get top stories.

The process of turning space gasses into dust is explained by NASA.

The most common element found in stars, hydrogen, can’t form 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. The heavy elements in the wind cool as they travel into space and are then compressed where the winds from both stars meet, like when two hands knead dough.

The Wolf- Rayet 140 system has a dust ring pattern. The winds of the two stars only clash when they get close to each other. Dust can be churned out nonstop with other Wolf- Rayet duos.

Astronomers have only found about 600 of these systems in the Milky Way. They think there should be at least a few thousand.

The data shows that Wolf-Rayet stars produce the same carbon-rich dust molecule as humans and other life on Earth.

There are more studies that will show how the stars affect the material between them.