Alien megastructures? Cosmic thumbprint? What's behind a James Webb telescope photo that had even astronomers stumped?

Astronomers were perplexed by a new image of a distant star system surrounded by rings. The picture, which appears to be a kind of "cosmic thumbprint," came from the James Webb Space Telescope.

The internet was ablaze with theories. It was claimed that it was evidence for alien megastructures.

We were able to use physics to understand what we were seeing because our team had been studying this star for more than two decades.

The model we published in Nature explains the strange process by which the star creates the dazzling pattern of rings.

There are secrets ofWR140.

The Wolf-Rayet star is calledWR140. They are among the most extreme stars. They can sometimes emit a huge amount of dust into space, stretching hundreds of times the size of our solar system.

The radiation field around Wolf-Rayets is so intense that the dust and wind can be seen thousands of kilometers away. All stars have good winds, but these overachievers drive something even better.

The wind contains elements that form dust.

There are a few dusty Wolf-Rayet stars in a system. The giant blue supergiant is in the same area as it is.

Only a few systems like WR140 are known in the entire universe, yet these are the ones that deliver the most beautiful gift to the astronomer. Dust doesn't just stream out from the star to form a hazy ball, it forms in a cone-shaped area where the winds from the two stars collide

The shock front must rotation because the star is in constant motion. The spiral is similar to the jet from a garden sprinkler.

There are a few more tricks up its sleeve. Dust production turns on and off as the two stars near each other and leave the closest approach.

Our team tracked the location of dust features in three-dimensional space by modeling all these effects into the three-dimensional geometry.

The model of the expanding flow was found to fit the data almost perfectly thanks to the careful tagging of the images.

Except for a small problem. The dust was not where it should be. A phenomenon never before caught on camera was the result of chasing that minor misfit.

Light's power.

Light can exert a push on matter if it carries momentum. Matter coasting at high speed around the universe is a result of this phenomenon.

It has been difficult to catch it in time. Tracking the movement of matter in a strong radiation field is important to see material being accelerated.

The models for WR140 did not include this acceleration. The data did not fit because the expansion speed was not constant.

For the first time, I caught that on camera. It is as if the star is making a sail out of dust. The dusty sail leaps forward when it catches the intense radiation from the star.

There is smoke in space.

All this physics is beautiful. The smoke rings are sculpted like clockwork toys.

The physics is written in the detail of the ring. The only thing we have to do is wait for the wind to blow so we can see the dust shell.

The shells are like giant dolls.

The true extent to which we hit on the right geometry to explain the star system was not brought to us until the new image arrived.

There were more than 17 exquisitely sculpted shells, each one a replica nested within the one preceding it. The oldest shell in the image must have been launched about 150 years before the newest shell, which is still in its infancy and speeding away from the stars.

The Wolf-Rayets have provided one of the most intriguing and intricately patterned images to have been released by the new telescope.

One of the first pictures taken was this. Astronomers are waiting for the new wonders of the observatory to beam down.

Under a Creative Commons license, this article is re-posted. The original article is worth a read.