Bizarre ‘Smoke Rings’ In Space Revealed In Jaw-Dropping New Webb Telescope Image, But What Are They?
The two stars in Wolf-Rayet 140, shown here, produce shells of dust every eight years that look like … [+]
Weird concentric ripples or smoky “squircles” emanating from a star that had social media baffled in August have been revealed to be a giant plume of dust generated by two massive stars.
An image taken by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) of a binary star system called WR140 at first brought a confused response from astronomers. After all, the mysterious curved, box or ring-like structure enveloping a star looks simply unbelievable.
A paper published in Nature alongside a complementary study published in Nature Astronomy today reveal the image of WR140 to be showing dust plumes being “pushed” into space by intense starlight.
The observations were made by astronomers at the universities of Cambridge and Sydney as part of a pre-planned study in JWST’s Early Release Science (ERS) program.
WR140 is a binary star system about 5,600 light-years distant in the Cygnus constellation comprising a giant Wolf-Rayet star and an even bigger blue supergiant star. The stars orbit each other, but the blue supergiant star has a highly elliptical orbit around the small star. When it does get close, which happens about once every eight years, a shell of dust is ejected into space.
It’s multiple accelerating dust plumes that JWST’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) captured—about 20 of them—that make-up the intriguing image. MIRI detects the longest infrared wavelengths so can find cool objects like these dust rings. The dust is largely carbon condensed as soot, which glows in the infrared. Each plume of dust stretches thousands of times the distance from the Earth to the Sun.
“Like clockwork, this star puffs out sculpted smoke rings every eight years, with all this wonderful physics written then inflated in the wind like a banner for us to read,” said co-author Professor Peter Tuthill from the University of Sydney. “Eight years later as the binary returns in its orbit, another appears the same as the one before, streaming out into space inside the bubble of the previous one, like a set of giant nested Russian dolls.”
The unusual events in WR140 give astronomers a unique opportunity to observe how starlight can affect matter, specifically by seeing starlight cause matter to accelerate—something that’s extremely rare to observe.
Wolf–Rayets are among the most massive stars that have been found in the Milky Way only 500 times. They are thought to exist for only a few million years—a mere moment in cosmic time—and thought to explode violently at the end of their lives. “We’ll now be able to make observations like this much more easily than from the ground, opening a new window into the world of Wolf-Rayet physics,” said Ryan Lau, who led the JWST study.
Wishing you clear skies and wide eyes.
