The latest image from NASAs James Webb Space Telescope is a new perspective on the binary star Wolf-Rayet 140, revealing details and structure in a new light. More

Astronomer Ryan Lau of NSFs NOIRLab, principal investigator of the Webb Early Release Science program that observed the star, shares his thoughts on the observations.

"On the night that my teams Webb Early Release Science observations of the dust-forming massive binary star Wolf-Rayet (WR) 140 were taken, I was puzzled by what I saw in the preview images from Webbs Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI). There seemed to be a strange-looking diffraction pattern, and I worried that it was a visual effect created by the stars extreme brightness. However, as soon as I downloaded the final data I realized that I was not looking at a diffraction pattern, but instead rings of dust surrounding WR 140 at least 17 of them.

I was amazed. Although they resemble rings in the Webb image, the true 3D geometry of those semi-circular features is better described as a shell. The shells of dust are formed each time the stars reach a point in their orbit where they are closest to each other and their stellar winds interact. The even spacing between the shells indicates that dust formation events are occurring like clockwork, once in each eight-year orbit. In this case, the 17 shells can be counted like tree rings, showing more than 130 years of dust formation. Our confidence in this interpretation of the image was strengthened by comparing our findings to the geometric dust models by Yinuo Han, a doctoral student at the University of Cambridge, which showed a near-perfect match to our observations.

Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, JPL-Caltech.

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Webb Space Telescope GSFC/NASA