NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope observed oddly shaped concentric rings around a distant star that they can’t fully explain – with one scientist calling the image “insane”.
A star in the constellation Cygnus and some 5,600 light-years from Earth, WR140 is surrounded by curved but oddly boxy rings colored red in the image shared on Twitter by citizen scientist Judy Schmidt.
“No, I don’t know what that is. A kind of spiral nebula around WR140. I’m sure we’ll find out more later,” Schmidt wrote.
Mark McCaughrean, senior adviser on science and exploration at the European Space Agency and a member of the James Webb Space Telescope Science Working Group, said: “Well, that’s crazy.”
Scroll down for videos
A star in the constellation Cygnus and some 5,600 light-years from Earth, WR140 is surrounded by curved but oddly boxy rings colored red in the image shared on Twitter by citizen scientist Judy Schmidt
Mark McCaughrean noted that WR140 is what is known as a Wolf-Rayet star, which sheds much of its hydrogen into space and tends to be surrounded by dust that can be sculpted into strange shells by a companion star
“The six-pointed blue structure is an optical diffraction artifact from bright star WR140 in this #JWST MIRI image,” he said, referring to the way Webb’s mirrors bend light to create the spikes.
“But red curvy yet boxy stuff is real, a bunch of shells around WR140. Actually in space. Around a star.’
McCaughrean noted that WR140 is what is known as a Wolf-Rayet star, which sheds much of its hydrogen into space and tends to be surrounded by dust that can be sculpted into strange shells by a companion star.
These types of stars are known to be extremely massive — often 15 times the mass of the Sun — and will quickly burn up their nuclear fuel. They exhibit very fast winds, can become extremely bright, and often create a stunning haze of vented gas around them.
“No, I don’t know what that is. A kind of spiral nebula around WR140. I’m sure we’ll learn more later,” wrote citizen scientist Judy Schmidt on Twitter
“However, this promises to be another area to be revolutionized by JWST, making great use of its diffraction-limited resolution and extreme thermal infrared sensitivity, helping us to understand the final evolutionary stages of living, rapidly dying, young massive stars,” he said
“Yes, these nested ‘Squircular’ rings are real,” Ryan Lau, an astronomer at NOIRLab and principal investigator on the project that acquired the observations, said on Twitter. “Our paper on this has been submitted so please stay tuned for the full story.”
Schmidt later responded to her own thread: “They look like airy rings, but they’re not. They are shells of gas and dust.”
“The red shells are actual physical structures around the Wolf-Rayet star: they are famous for such things carved out of their dust ejecta by the orbits of binary companions. But this is a particularly spectacular example of #JWST,” said McCaughrean.
Lau and his colleagues published an article in the Astrophysical Journal about another Wolf-Rayet star called WR112.
“It’s not immediately clear to me what exactly the geometry is in WR140 with the curved yet boxy shells and why there are discrete, separate shells rather than a spiral structure… well I’m sure Ryan and his colleagues are working on that now,” added McCaughrean later.
“However, this promises to be another area to be revolutionized by JWST, making great use of its diffraction-limited resolution and extreme thermal infrared sensitivity, helping us to understand the final evolutionary stages of living, rapidly dying, young massive stars,” he said including a picture of Elvis Presley with his tweet.
This latest image comes shortly after the first image of an exoplanet 385 light-years from Earth.
The telescope used its near-infrared camera (NIRCam) and mid-infrared instrument (MIRI), which can block surrounding starlight, to capture epic images of exoplanet HIP 65426.
The alien world was first spotted by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile in 2017, but the long wavelengths were blocked by Earth’s atmosphere.
The exoplanet is only 15 to 20 million years old, which is much younger than our 4.5 billion year old Earth.
“But Webb’s first image of an exoplanet already hints at future opportunities for exploring distant worlds,” NASA said in a statement.
“It’s not immediately clear to me what exactly the geometry is in WR140 with the curved yet boxy shells and why there are discrete, separate shells rather than a spiral structure… well I’m sure Ryan and his colleagues are working on that right now” , McCaughrean later added. ABOVE: A James Webb Space Telescope image of Stephan’s quartet
Lau and his colleagues published an article in the Astrophysical Journal about another Wolf-Rayet star called WR112. ABOVE: a James Webb Space Telescope image of the Southern Ring Nebula
