{"id":144070,"date":"2025-11-20T19:28:09","date_gmt":"2025-11-20T19:28:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/144070\/"},"modified":"2025-11-20T19:28:09","modified_gmt":"2025-11-20T19:28:09","slug":"webb-telescope-images-an-aging-binary-star-system-in-the-center-of-a-four-layered-cosmic-dust-shell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/144070\/","title":{"rendered":"Webb telescope images an aging binary star system in the center of a four-layered cosmic dust shell"},"content":{"rendered":"

NASA\u2019s James Webb Space Telescope has shown us images<\/a> of space<\/a> we\u2019d never see otherwise, and one of the latest wonders it has captured is of an unusual star system in our galaxy with what the agency describes as<\/a> \u201cfour serpentine spirals of dust.\u201d Previous observations of the Apep system, named after the Egyptian god of chaos and located<\/a> around 8,000 light-years away from Eath, showed only one shell. But as you can see in the mid-infrared image captured by Webb above, it actually has four shells, with the most outer one at the very edges of the image. These shells are made out of dense carbon dust emitted by the system\u2019s two Wolf-Rayet stars over the last 700 years.<\/p>\n

Wolf-Rayets are massive stars nearing the end of their lives. They\u2019re very rare, and scientists believe there are only a thousand in our galaxy. Apep happens to have two of them. Yinuo Han<\/a> from Caltech and Ryan White<\/a> from the Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia have recently published their own papers about the system. They combined measurements from Webb\u2019s observations with years of data from the European Southern Observatory\u2019s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile to determine that the two stars \u201cswing by one another\u201d once very 190 years. The stars then pass close to each other for 25 years, causing their strong stellar winds to collide and cast out huge amounts of carbon-rich dust within that timeframe.<\/p>\n

Thanks to the Webb telescope\u2019s observations, they were also able to confirm the presence of a third star in the system that\u2019s gravitationally bound to the two Wolf-Rayets. The third star is a massive supergiant 40 to 50 times bigger than our sun, and it carved a cavity, which looks like a funnel, into the shells. You can see the cavity in the shells in the video below.<\/p>\n

Apep\u2019s Wolf-Rayet stars used to be bigger than the supergiant, but they\u2019ve since shed most of their masses and are now only 10 to 20 times the mass of our sun. In time, the two stars will explode into a supernova and possibly turn into a black hole.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NASA\u2019s James Webb Space Telescope has shown us images of space we\u2019d never see otherwise, and one of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":144071,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[88531,85,46,9795,88530,141,145,20241,88532],"class_list":{"0":"post-144070","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-carbon-dust","9":"tag-il","10":"tag-israel","11":"tag-james-webb-space-telescope","12":"tag-macquarie-university","13":"tag-science","14":"tag-space","15":"tag-star-system","16":"tag-wolf-rayet-stars"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144070","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=144070"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144070\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/144071"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=144070"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=144070"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=144070"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}