Cosmic Dust Rings Spotted by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope

An image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope reveals a remarkable sight: at least 17 concentric dust rings emanating from a pair of stars located about 5,300 light-years from Earth. Each ring was created when the stars came close together and their colliding stellar winds (streams of gas they blow into space) caused some of the gas to compress into dust.

Collectively known as Wolf-Rayet 140, the stars’ orbits bring them together about once every eight years, so just like the growth rings of a tree trunk, these dusty loops mark the passage of time: The 17 rings reveal more than a century of stellar interactions. And while other Wolf-Rayet stars produce dust, no other pair is known to produce rings quite like Wolf-Rayet 140.

Because the stars’ orbits are elliptical rather than circular, the distance between the stars changes constantly, and dust forms only when they are close. The amount of dust produced by this interaction varies, so the system doesn’t form a perfect bullseye. One of the densest regions of dust production creates the bright feature repeating at 2 o’clock.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech