Dust Rings in the Wolf-Rayet 140 System

A CLOSER LOOK

This image from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope reveals at least 17 concentric dust rings emanating from a pair of stars orbiting one another. Located just over 5,000 light-years from Earth, the system is known as Wolf-Rayet 140 because one of the stars is a Wolf-Rayet star. The other is an O-type star, one of the most massive star types known. Each ring was created when the two stars came close together and their stellar winds (streams of gas they blow into space) collided, compressing the gas and forming dust. A ring is produced once per orbit, every 7.93 years. A Wolf-Rayet star is an O-type star born with at least 25 times more mass than our Sun that is nearing the end of its life, when it will likely collapse directly to black hole, or explode as a supernova. These delays between pe

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