The internet erupted in late July when the James Webb Space Telescope caught the first
image of a pair of stars encircled by ghostly dust shells.
While some space enthusiasts speculated about extraterrestrial megastructures, astronomers
investigated the physics.
The image also included several mysterious shapes, such as a diagonal "spear" of light,
which some scientists mistook for a telescope glitch.
Have NASA and JWST finally encountered aliens?
Was it an alien structure?
Join us as we look into what the JWST captured that shocked everyone!
The star responsible for the mind-boggling show is known as WR140, which is in fact a
system of two stars that circle each other.
WR 140 is located in Cygnus, a prominent constellation in northern hemisphere sky, more than 5,000
light-years distant.
At its core sits one of the universe's most extreme types of stars - these huge stars
are extremely rare — our galaxy has roughly one in a billion stars.
They are extraordinarily brilliant in comparison to other stars because they are on the brink
of bursting.
One of the stars in the pair is designated as a Wolf-Rayet, a rare form of star that
is hundreds of thousands of times brighter and far hotter than the sun.
"Wolf-Rayets are so luminous, they're almost flying apart under their own luminosity,"
said Peter Tuthill of the University of Sydney, the study's co-author.
They also emit a lot of radiation and blast winds including components like carbon, which
infrared telescopes like the JWST can detect.
According to Yinuo Han, an astronomer at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom and lead
author on one of the new studies about WR140, Wolf-Rayet stars represent the final stage
in the evolution of giant stars dozens of times more massive than the sun before they
explode in supernovas and turn into black holes.
The second star in the WR140 system is a little less brilliant massive star, roughly 20 times
the size of the sun, that is just shy of Wolf Rayet size.
The interplay of these two massive stars causes cosmic fireworks, which result in the bizarrely
curved concentric rings observed by the James Webb Space Telescope.
The fact that WR 140 pumps out dust at all is a mystery.
"Everything about this star screams, 'I'm going to bake any dust into oblivion'."
Professor Tuthill explained.
However, Dr. Han's modelling, which was based on high-resolution infrared data from the
Keck Telescope in Hawaii, indicated that WR 140 had a few of tricks up its sleeve.
Two recent investigations disclose the mysteries of this fascinating system.
The team had predicted that the stars would be encircled by a single dust shell.
However, the JWST findings, which were published in the journal Nature Astronomy, indicated
that there were more than 17 shells nested within each other.
"I was like, 'Wow, it's much better than we thought it was going to look like,'" one of
the co-authors remarked.
The image also included several enigmatic objects, such as a diagonal "spear" of light,
which some scientists mistook for a telescope error.
"If you said, 'Is this a real or a fake web image?'
I think you could have surveyed professionals and you could have wrong-footed a lot of them
with it," Peter Tuthill said.
But, as fate would have it, Professor Tuthill's student Yinuo Han had just completed a 3D
model of WR 140 based on 20 years of data.
Their model, which was also published in a separate publication in the journal Nature,
detailed how the system's dust rings were sculpted and demonstrated that the characteristics
in the breathtaking image were not illusions.
These two stars have unusually irregular orbits around one other.
They come near to each other every eight years and create dust.
It is this dust that we see ripple out from the star in the image; the gap between the
rings is created when the stars are further distant.
Astronomers frequently observe stars spewing dust, according to Yinuo.
But what's even more fascinating is how this dust travels across the cosmos.
"These stars form very powerful solar winds," Yinuo said, referencing streams of charged
particles escaping from the atmospheres of stars including our sun.
"In the case of these stars, the solar winds are more like a hurricane.
When the stars get to a certain distance from each other, the hurricanes combine, and we
see these fireworks, these puffs of dust."
So, how are dust shells formed?
This Wolf-Rayet is in a frenzied tango with an O-type star, a scorching, blue cosmic giant.
However, because its orbit is not circular, the Wolf-Rayet only emits dust every eight
years when it is close to its stellar partner, the O-type star.
That indicates the dust shells shown in the JWST image formed in only 136 years.
The dust is driven by stellar winds that collide with winds from the other star, resulting
in the cosmic equivalent of a cone-shaped storm front curved around the weaker O-type
star.
The motion of the stars twists the storm front, spreading the plume of sooty dust out like
a fountain.
"The underlying math is extremely simple, it's just a cone wrapped into a spiral," Tuthill
explained.
The researchers predicted that the circular clouds of dust would move away from the star
pair at a constant pace.
There is nothing to slow the dust down in space, so the shells should continue to ripple
away into the surrounding galaxy at the speed of the hurricane-force winds that gave them
the first kick.
However, when the researchers examined images of WR140 obtained by the Keck Observatory
in Hawaii, one of the biggest telescopes on the planet, they discovered that the dust
was actually gaining speed as it moved.
The researchers think that the dust is propelled by the extremely brilliant sunlight generated
by the WR140 binary star, which is around a million times brighter than the sun.
The Keck Observatory imaged a tiny part of WR140's innermost dust shell several times.
The difference between the following image sets revealed the acceleration.
Keck, although being one of our planet's most powerful telescopes, can only view the first
two concentric waves.
Images from the James Webb Space Telescope, on the other hand, show 17 shells extending
into the distance at properly spaced intervals, demonstrating the telescope's observational
capability.
The James Webb Space Telescope measurements also indicated that the dust produced by these
stars contains organic, carbon-rich granules, which are the building blocks of life on Earth.
Moving on, the James Webb Space Telescope has captured yet another stunning image.
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has photographed the magnificent Pillars of Creation, a rich,
highly detailed environment where new stars are forming beneath dense clouds of gas and
dust.
The three-dimensional pillars have the appearance of grand rock formations, yet they are significantly
more porous.
These columns are composed of chilly interstellar gas and dust that appears semi-transparent
in near-infrared light at times.
The majestic Pillars of Creation, located 7,000 light-years away in the constellation
Serpens, are column-shaped clouds of interstellar dust and gas that are part of the Eagle Nebula.
Eagle Nebula is located within the Milky Way galaxy.
Webb is able to see the Pillars against the thick band of our galactic home, which obscures
the view of the more distant cosmos.
Webb's new perspective of the Pillars of Creation, which were initially observed by NASA's Hubble
Space Telescope in 1995, may aid researchers in revising their models of star formation
by detecting significantly more exact counts of newly formed stars, as well as the amounts
of gas and dust in the vicinity.
They will gradually get a better knowledge of how stars originate and explode out of
these dusty clouds over millions of years.
In this image from Webb's Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), young new stars steal the show.
These are the brilliant red orbs with diffraction spikes that are usually found outside one
of the dusty pillars.
When enough knots develop among the pillars of gas and dust, they begin to collapse under
their own gravity, gradually heat up, and finally create new stars.
What about those wavy lava-like lines on the sides of some pillars?
While Hubble's Pillars are black and scary, towering against a foggy background of a very
empty cosmos, Webb's are softer and more intricately organized, with vivid red "lava flows" surrounding
the margins of some of the clouds.
These "lava flows" are actually material expelled by developing stars, according to the European
Space Agency (ESA), which collaborates with NASA on the James Webb Space Telescope project.
Young stars emit supersonic jets that collide with clouds of material, such as these thick
pillars, on a regular basis.
This can occasionally result in bow shocks, which can generate undulating patterns resembling
a boat moving across water.
The red glow is caused by the energetic hydrogen molecules produced by jets and shocks.
This can be seen in the second and third pillars from the top, where the NIRCam image almost
pulses with activity.
These youthful stars are just a few hundred thousand years old, according to estimates.
Although it appears that Webb was able to "pierce through" the clouds to expose vast
cosmic distances beyond the pillars, this image contains essentially no galaxies.
Instead, in the densest region of our Milky Way galaxy's disc, a combination of transparent
gas and dust known as the interstellar medium obscures our view of most of the deeper cosmos.
Hubble captured this view in 1995 and revisited it in 2014, but several other observatories
have also focused their attention on this region.
Each modern device provides researchers with new information about this star-studded area.
For Webb, this is just the beginning.
The astronomers expect more ground-breaking discoveries in the months and years to come.
Let’s hear what you think about these stunning images captured by the JWST in the comments.