[The Epoch Times, October 15, 2022](The Epoch Times reporter Li Yan comprehensive report) Since July, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has continued to provide an incredible picture of the Earth space image. On Wednesday (October 12), Webb surprised us again.
As stated in a related paper published by NASA in the journal Nature Astronomy, this time Webb showed an astonishing 17 concentric dust rings.
The agency believes these hazy halos are the work of the two stars together. The two stars are just over 5,000 light-years from Earth. Their stellar winds will occasionally meet and shake hands. Whenever the shining streams of gas from the two stars intertwine, they form a dust ring. As NASA puts it, this is where the “fingerprint” comes in.
What’s particularly intriguing about this “fingerprint” is that it allows scientists to calculate the passage of time.
Basically, each of these 17 rings happens to symbolize an interstellar date, just as tree rings tell us a tree’s age. All in all, from what Webb has captured, scientists think these stars meet about every eight years.
“We are seeing more than a century of dust formation in this system,” Ryan Lau, lead author of the new study, said in a statement.
Previously, only two dust rings were visible with our existing ground-based telescopes. “Right now, we’ve seen at least 17,” said the astronomer at the National Science Foundation’s NOIR Laboratory. “This image also shows how sensitive this telescope is.”
The discovery was made thanks to Webb’s mid-infrared instrument, or MIRI. In contrast to its near-infrared sensors, MIRI focuses on light emitted from space objects found in the mid-infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum.
In addition, the team pointed out that the “Wolf-Rayet” (WR star) in this star system is rare. For this reason, the pair was named Wolf-Rayet 140.
“Although Wolf-Rayet stars are rare in our galaxy because they In other words, they have a very short lifespan. But throughout the history of the Milky Way, they have the potential to produce large amounts of dust before exploding and/or forming black holes.”
The other star is an O-type star, an ultra-hot object that is also harder to spot. The O-type star is about 30 times more massive than the Sun, while its companion WR star is about 10 times more massive.
Responsible editor: Li Yuan#