The James Webb telescope captured a stunning image of the 'fingerprint' that forms when 2 stars come close to each other in orbit
- The James Webb Space Telescope captured the rare sight of a "fingerprint" in space.
- The "fingerprint" in the image consists of 17 concentric circles radiating from a point of contact.
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has detected a new, wondrous sight — a cosmic fingerprint radiating out from a point of contact between two distant stars.
An image released by NASA on Tuesday showed what appears to be concentric rings radiating out from a point of contact between a pair of gigantic stars called the Wolf-Rayet 140, located around 5,000 light-years from Earth. This pair consists of a Wolf-Rayet star ten times bigger than the sun, and a companion supergiant star that's 30 times bigger than the sun.
According to NASA's description of the photograph, the rings are produced whenever the two stars come close to each other in their orbit, which happens once every eight years. The stellar winds — or gas streams — from the stars are compressed, and turn into dust, creating rings.
NASA characterized the interaction between two stars and the wave-like rings emanating from their point of almost-contact as a "celestial dance." The agency added that the rings seen in this picture are akin to circles in a tree trunk, with each loop marking another eight-year cycle.
"We're looking at over a century of dust production from this system," said astronomer Ryan Lau, lead author of a study on the Wolf-Rayet 140 star system. "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."
Peter Tuthill, an astronomy professor at the University of Sydney and a co-author on the study, told The Guardian that the photo showed how Wolf-Rayet 140 "puffs out" a smoke ring every eight years, "like clockwork."
"Eight years later, as the binary returns in its orbit, another ring appears, the same as the one before, streaming out into space inside the bubble of the previous one, like a set of giant nested Russian dolls," Tuthill said.
The James Webb telescope has been beaming back photograph after photograph of never-before-seen space footage, including images of a 13.5-billion-year-old galaxy, the oldest part of space that humans have ever seen. The James Webb telescope is currently orbiting the sun, around a million miles from Earth, aiming to observe light in distant galaxies.
In September, the telescope captured images of the Orion Nebula, a star nursery around 1,350 light-years from Earth. The telescope's infrared cameras managed to spot star-forming clouds and gas cocoons that were not picked up by the Hubble telescope.
Also in September, the telescope snapped a clear image of Neptune's rings, providing the best view mankind has had of the planet since the Voyager 2 spacecraft flew past Neptune in 1989.