Two stars revolve around each other

The James Webb Space Telescope He continues to teach us how incredible the universe is in detail. The new image taken by the advanced observatory reveals an unusual phenomenon in the depths of Milky Waya 5600 light years from Earth.

The shot was captured with the telescope’s mid-infrared (MIRI) camera, also processed by a citizen scientist. Judy Schmidt.

Although the central part of the image shows a single bright object, it is actually there Two stars revolve around each other. This binary star system is called WR140It was discovered in 1999. But the only pictures we had were very simple.

In the image just taken by Webb, the spikes emerging from it correspond to the diffraction of light recorded by the telescope’s mirrors.

stellar wind collision

WR 140, located in the constellation Cygnus, consists of two unusual stars: a Wolf-Rayet star and a companion O-type. Wolf-Rayet stars are very old and O-type stars are very massive. Both are very hot and bright. They also emit stellar winds (gas flow) at about 3000 kilometers per second and lose mass at an accelerating rate.

But what sets the WR 140 apart is that it The orbits are elliptical. This means that they pass through a point where they move apart (apoastron) and a point where they move closer to each other (periastron), as shown in the following animation of Container and the European Space Agency (ESA).

In this case, perihelion occurs when they are at a very short distance, slightly more than the distance between the Earth and the Sun, close enough for their winds to collide. Collisions of this material around stars accelerate the particles and generate X-rays, and as the gas emitted by the stars cools, dust forms, explains Mark McGreen, scientific advisor to the European Space Agency.

This dust absorbs ultraviolet rays from these stars and heats up, emitting heat radiation. This is exactly what James Webb captures infrared wavelengths. Dust is blown away by the aftershock of stellar winds. Therefore, in each circumference, a new dust layer is formed. As they move away, they expand and become colder and cooler.

And this is how we got to the Webb picture: it looks like layers of dust in reality Bubbles around the stars. However, what is observed are the edges of each one (the rings), as they focus a greater density of material from our perspective.