The James Webb Space Telescope recently peered into space to find a dazzling collection of rings of dust shooting away from a pair of stars 5,000 light-years from Earth. This was announced by the space agency last week.
A luminous imprint
The sheer number and near-perfect spacing of the rings unfurl like a luminous imprint against the vast backdrop of infinite darkness. The JWST spotted 17 of these rings, far more than previous telescopes were able to detect.
stars bigger than the sun
Wolf-Rayet is a pair of stars that are both several times larger and more massive than our own Sun. This binary system consists of a Wolf-Rayet star, whose mass is 10 times greater than that of the Sun, and an O star, which is three times more massive than its orbital neighbor.
Celestial Ring Duos
The small star ejects elements such as carbon in its stellar wind, which cools and turns to dust as it moves away from the celestial body. A quirk in the orbit of this binary system allows impressive rings of dust to drift away from the duo.