The "Spider's Web" Mystery (First Appeared / Visible To Earth, Some 5,000 Years Ago)... Wolf-Rayet 140: Solved, By NASA's Next Gen Space 'Scope Team...

Back in early September, we mentioned what we thought might be an enduring open question: what physics might be at work to create the strange, sort of rectangular wavelets, at right spinning off of Wolf-Rayet 140 (near Gaia).

It turns out that the mystery was solved in under a month, with the power of our new [name redacted] space telescope, out at L2.

Having a new, and very powerful tool. . . makes all the difference. It turns out that two stars (one very large, and massive; the other very small and now dying) are revolving tightly around each other, at about once every eight years, and as they draw closest in each orbital cycle the stellar winds compress into each other, creating something not unlike a set of rings, in a tree's cross-section. Do watch the YouTube explainer at bottom, as the compression force creates a regular series of more opaque (carbon dust) bands, and those propagate out at a regular interval / steady speed, over time. So each ring represents about eight years' time, on Earth.

It remains unclear, to me, at least -- why the wave pattern isn't more circular / elliptical. . . but instead seems to most-nearly resemble a "rectangular boxed" shape. I guess that is for future study / observations. It also turns out (via the video, at one minute and twenty seconds!) that because the duo's orbits are so highly-elliptical, each of the close approaches causes a flattened curve to be propagated outward, in bands of carbon filled dust. . . thus explaining why it looks flat on two sides. Wild!

Here's the latest, from this past week:

. . .A new image shows at least 17 dust rings created by a rare type of star and its companion locked in a celestial dance. . . .

A new image from NASA’s [Redacted] Space Telescope reveals a remarkable cosmic sight: at least 17 concentric dust rings emanating from a pair of stars. Located just over 5,000 light-years from Earth, the duo is collectively known as Wolf-Rayet 140.

Each ring was created when the two stars came close together and their stellar winds (streams of gas they blow into space) met, compressing the gas and forming dust. The stars’ orbits bring them together about once every eight years; like the growth of rings of a tree’s trunk, the dust loops mark the passage of time.

“We’re looking at over a century of dust production from this system,” said Ryan Lau, an astronomer at NSF’s NOIRLab and lead author of a new study about the system, published today in the journal Nature Astronomy. “The image also illustrates just how sensitive this telescope is. Before, we were only able to see two dust rings, using ground-based telescopes. Now we see at least 17 of them. . . .”

This truly is a phenomenal time to be alive, and able to witness the progress of all scientific endeavors -- but especially interstellar space science:



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