New View: A Pair of Wolf-Rayet Stars Named Apep | James Webb Space Telescope
This new NASA/European Space Agency/Canadian Space Agency James Webb Space Telescope’s mid-infrared image shows four coiled shells of dust around a pair of Wolf-Rayet stars known as Apep for the first time. Previous observations by other telescopes showed only one.
Webb’s data, combined with observations from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, confirmed that the two Wolf-Rayet stars sail past one another approximately every 190 years. Over each orbit, they make a close pass for 25 years, producing and spewing amorphous carbon dust.
Wolf-Rayet stars can be around 20 times as massive as our sun, but seem to be on a mission to shed surplus mass as quickly as possible—they blast substantial winds of particles out into space, causing them to dwindle at a rapid rate. A typical star of this type can lose a mass equal to that of our sun in just 100,000 years!
These massive stars are also incredibly hot, with surface temperatures some 10 to 40 times that of the sun, and very luminous, glowing at tens of thousands to several million times the brightness of the sun. Many of the brightest and most massive stars in the Milky Way are Wolf-Rayet stars.
Because these stars are so intense they do not last very long, burning up their fuel and blasting their bulk out into the cosmos on very short timescale—only a few hundred thousand years.
Webb’s new data also confirmed that there are three stars gravitationally bound to one another in this system. Holes are “sliced” into these shells by the third star, a massive supergiant.
https://science.nasa.gov/missions/webb/webb-first-to-show-4-dust-shells-spiraling-apep-limits-long-orbit/
Image description: Four dust shells in Wolf-Rayet Apep expand away from three central stars that appear as a single pinpoint of light. The shells are curved, and the interior shell looks like a backward lowercase e shape.
Release Date: Nov. 19, 2025
#NASA #Astronomy #Space #Science #NASAWebb #Nebula #ApepNebula #BinaryStarSystems #Norma #Constellations #Astrophysics #Cosmos #Universe #UnfoldTheUniverse #JWST #NIRCam #InfraredAstronomy #ESA #Europe #CSA #Canada #GSFC #STScI #UnitedStates #STEM #Education
No comments:
Post a Comment