James Webb Space Telescope Feed Post

Webb Watches Carbon-Rich Dust Shells Form, Expand in Star System

Like images of broken light, Webb captured these carbon-rich dust shells around a binary star system. Drifting swiftly outwards, they are seeding their surroundings with carbon - one way elements spread across the universe. science.nasa.gov/missions/webb/webb-watches-carbon-rich-d... Wolf-Rayet 140 contains two massive stars that follow a tight, elongated orbit. (In these images, they are within the central white dot.) As they swing past each other, their stellar winds collide, compressing and forming these rings of carbon-rich dust. Though many events in space take place over vast timescales, these rings (Webb spotted 17 of them) are moving outward from their stars at more than 1600 miles/s, making them noticeably different from one year to the next. Like clockwork, the stars’ winds generate dust for several months every eight years, as the pair make their closest approach to each other. Webb shows where dust formation stops — look for the darker region at top left of the images. The dust here isn’t uniform. In places it has “piled up” in amorphous clouds as large as our whole solar system; other individual particles float freely. The spread of this carbon-rich dust into the galactic neighborhood is key for the formation of solar systems like ours. Some of these dust shells have persisted for more than 130 years, and this system could generate tens of thousands of shells over hundreds of thousands of years. Ultimately, massive stars end their lives in a supernova explosion, likely the fate of Wolf-Rayet 140. Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI; Science: Emma Lieb (University of Denver), Ryan Lau (NSF NOIRLab), Jennifer Hoffman (University of Denver) Image description: A three-part graphic. The left and center images show two observations of Wolf-Rayet 140, from July 2022 at left and from September 2023 at center. Both show a bright white point of light surrounded by 17 regularly spaced, hazy dust shells at the bottom, right, and upper right. The panels each have an outline of a square overlayed toward the top right, which has a brighter white outline of a triangle. At left, the triangle points up and is labeled a. At right, the triangle points down and is labeled b. The third panel at right shows a magnified version of the areas outlined in the left and center panels. There are two labels. At top left, a, and at bottom right, b. It is very obvious that the arced orange shells do not perfectly match in the middle where they are spliced together. The arcs at left appear lower, and the arcs at right all appear higher. Each arc lines up for about half its width. Image & Description by NASA