James Webb Space Telescope captured a stunning new image of two dying stars covered in dust spirals.
The extremely rare star system is located in the Milky Way galaxy, about 8,000 light years from Earth. When discovered in 2018, it was named after the ancient Egyptian snake god of chaos and destruction.
Now, new images taken by James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) capture the system with unprecedented details, revealing that not just one dying star, but two stars are squealing dust shrouds. Researchers published July 19 in two papers on Preprint Server Arxiv on July 19, but have not yet been peer-reviewed.
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“We were hoping it would look like one of these elegant pinwheel Nebras,” wrote Benjamin Pope, a study co-author who is a professor of statistical data science at Macquarie University in Sydney. “To my surprise, it wasn’t.”
Nebulae like these are formed by the stars of Wolf Reyette. These rare, slowly dying stars lost their outer hydrogen shells and vented gusts of ionized helium, carbon and nitrogen from within.
Wolf-Rayet Stars explode as a supernova after at most millions of years of sputtering. Until then, however, the radiation pressure from their light spreads their internal organs, extending them into the giant, phantom Kraziz of the night sky.
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These overheated contents, especially the carbon dust that is later recycled into the planets and our own body materials, become so hotter they glow brightly in the infrared spectrum. By capturing these infrared photons with an extremely large Chilean telescope, astronomers first peered into the system in 2018.
Now, training JWST’s delicate mid-infrared instruments with Apep makes the team capture it in greater detail, revealing it’s even more unusual than the original thought.
“Apep not only blows up one powerful star and weaker companions, but it’s not just two Wolf-Rayet Stars,” writes Pope. “The rival has a wind of almost equal strength, and the dust spreads into a very wide cone shape, enveloping it in the wind shape.”
It is the third star that further complicates the situation. He is a stable giant excavating a cavity of dust spit out by his dying brother.
Besides creating stunning pictures, the Pope said that studying Apep will allow them to talk more about how stars die, and the carbon dust they leave behind.
“The violence of the stellar death carves puzzles that make sense to Newton and Archimedes. It is a scientific joy to solve and share them,” the Pope writes.
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