James Webb Space Telescope captures strange rings around a distant star

by time news

Saturday 3 September 2022 06:12 PM

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has observed concentric rings strangely forming around a distant star they can’t fully explain. The star is called WR140. It is in the constellation Cygnus and resides about 5,600 light-years from Earth, surrounded by curved but strange box-shaped rings. She is red in the photo that scientist Judy Schmidt shared on Twitter.

According to the British newspaper, “Daily Mail”, Judy wrote on the image, “I don’t know what this is.. a kind of spiral nebula around WR140, and I’m sure we will find out more later.”

“The blue hexagonal structure is an important piece due to the optical diffraction of the bright star WR140,” said Mark McCogren, Senior Science and Exploration Adviser at the European Space Agency and a member of the James Webb Space Telescope Science Working Group, referring to the way Webb’s mirrors bend light to create ripples. in this picture”.

McGreen noted that WR140 is a so-called Wolf-Rayet star, which spews a lot of hydrogen into space and tends to be surrounded by dust that can form in strange shells by a companion star.


It is also known that these types of stars are extremely massive, often 15 times the mass of the Sun, and will burn through their primary fuel quickly.

This latest image comes shortly after the first image of an exoplanet located 385 light years from Earth.

The telescope used a near-infrared camera (NIRCam) and a medium-infrared instrument (MIRI) instrument that can block ambient starlight to capture epic images of the exoplanet HIP 65426.

Source: Technology: The James Webb Space Telescope captures strange rings around a distant star

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