A few weeks ago, we brought you a stunning image produced by Judy Schmidt using brand-new images from JWST. At the time, we didn’t know exactly what science would come from that data, and I thought we’d be waiting until Christmas to get an explanation of how these rings formed.

Well, I’m super pleased to say I was super wrong. Those science results came out in the latest issue of Nature in a paper led by Ryan Lau.

Here is what they report we’re seeing: at the core of at least seventeen concentric dust shells are two stars – a carbon-rich Wolf-Rayet star (WR 140) and a hot O-type star. These two massive stars are in a highly eccentric orbit that brings them close together every 7.93 years. Like all Wolf-Rayet stars, WR 140 is generating dust, but instead of shedding it fairly continuously, the dust is blasted off by its hot companion every time they sweep past each other.

The seventeen shells we see were emitted over 130 years. These rings contain carbon-rich dust and organic molecules formed with the carbon from the star.

Rarely do we get to see anything happen on human time scales, but the short-lived massive stars are giving us a rare and wonderful show we can actually watch evolve. Here is where I hope that JWST functions long enough to allow us to see new shells form and evolve over several 7.93-year cycles.

More Information

NASA press release

NASA JPL press release