The Universe, truly, is full of prodigies, and the James Webb Space Telescope has just given us our stylish views of one of them yet. 

The full image as processed by Judy Schmidt. (JWST/MIRI/Judy Schmidt)


The object in question is a star around,600 light- times down, and Webb's infrared eye has picked out an extraordinary detail it's girdled by what appear to be concentric rings of light radiating outward. 

 

 While Webb's characteristic diffraction harpoons aren't' real', those concentric rings are – and there is a awful and fascinating explanation for them. 

The star is actually a double brace of rare stars in the constellation of Cygnus, and their relations produce precise periodic eruptions of dust that are expanding out in shells into the space around the brace over time. 

 

 These shells of dust are glowing in infrared, which has allowed an instrument as sensitive as Webb's MIRI to resolve them in exquisite detail. The star is what's known as a colliding wind binary, conforming of an extremely rare Wolf- Rayet star, called WR 140, and a hot, massive O- type star companion – another rare object. 

Wolf- Rayet stars are veritably hot, veritably luminous, and veritably old; at the end of their main- sequence lifetime. They're significantly depleted in hydrogen, rich in nitrogen or carbon, and losing mass at a veritably high rate. 

 

O- type stars are among the most massive stars known, also veritably hot and bright; because they're so massive, their dates are incredibly brief. 

Both stars in the WR 140 system have fast astral winds, blowing out into space at around,000 kilometers(,864 long hauls) per second. Both are thus losing mass at a enough furious rate. So far so normal, for both stars. 

 

 Where it gets intriguing is their route, which is elliptical. This means the stars do not describe nice, neat circles around each other, but spheres, with a point at which they're furthest piecemeal from each other( apastron) and a point at which they're closest to each other( periastron). 

When the two stars enter periastron – a distance about a third lesser than the distance between Earth and the Sun – they come close enough that their important winds collide. 

 

 This produces shocks in the material around the stars, accelerating patches and generating energetic radiation, similar asX-rays. These colliding winds also induce occurrences of dust conformation as the material in the colliding astral wind cools. 

This process can be seen in the vitality below, which shows what the system would look like from the top down. 

 

Animation showing how the WR 140 binary produces dust at periastron. (NASA, ESA, Joseph Olmsted/STScI

 The dust is a form of carbon, which absorbs ultraviolet light from the two stars. This heats the dust, causing it tore-emit thermal radiation – which is what's observed by Webb in infrared wavelengths. 

The dust is also blown outward by the astral wind, performing in the expansion of the partial dust shells. They expand and cool as they're blown outward, losing heat and viscosity. 

What you are looking at in Webb's image is a bit like a series of bubbles; the edge of each dust shell is more visible because you are looking at a thick attention of material due to perspective. 

Because the double star's route has a7.94- time period, the wind collision and dust product do like clockwork every7.94 times. This means you can count the rings of the nebula around the binary, like tree rings, to determine the age of the remotest visible dust shell. 

Around 20 rings are visible, which means you can see around 160 times' worth of dust shells in the Webb image. The most recent WR 140 periastron was observed in 2016. 

Webb's observation of WR 140 was requested by a platoon led by astrophysicist Ryan Lau of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Institute of Space and Astronautical Science.