{"id":88834,"date":"2025-07-24T14:25:09","date_gmt":"2025-07-24T14:25:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/88834\/"},"modified":"2025-07-24T14:25:09","modified_gmt":"2025-07-24T14:25:09","slug":"swirling-nebula-of-two-dying-stars-revealed-in-spectacular-detail-in-new-webb-telescope-image","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/88834\/","title":{"rendered":"Swirling nebula of two dying stars revealed in spectacular detail in new Webb telescope image"},"content":{"rendered":"

The day before my thesis examination, my friend and radio astronomer Joe Callingham<\/a> showed me an image<\/a> we\u2019d been awaiting for five long years \u2013 an infrared photo of two dying stars we\u2019d requested from the Very Large Telescope<\/a> in Chile.<\/p>\n

I gasped \u2013 the stars were wreathed in a huge spiral of dust, like a snake eating its own tail.<\/p>\n

\"An<\/a><\/p>\n

The coils of Apep as captured by the European Space Observatory\u2019s Very Large Telescope.
\n ESO\/Callingham et al.<\/a>, CC BY<\/a><\/p>\n

We named it Apep<\/a>, for the Egyptian serpent god of destruction. Now, our team has finally been lucky to use NASA\u2019s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to look at Apep.<\/p>\n

If anything could top the first shock of seeing its beautiful spiral nebula, it\u2019s this breathtaking new image, with the JWST data now analysed in two<\/a> papers<\/a> on arXiv. <\/p>\n

Violent star deaths<\/p>\n

Right before they die as supernovae, the universe\u2019s most massive stars violently shed their outer hydrogen layers, leaving their heavy cores exposed.<\/p>\n

These are called Wolf-Rayet stars<\/a> after their discoverers, who noticed powerful streams of gas blasting out from these objects, much stronger than the stellar wind from our Sun. The Wolf-Rayet stage lasts only millennia \u2013 a blink of the eye in cosmic time scales \u2013 before they violently explode.<\/p>\n

Unlike our Sun, many stars in the universe<\/a> exist in pairs known as binaries. This is especially true of the most massive stars, such as Wolf-Rayets.<\/p>\n

When the fierce gales from a Wolf-Rayet star clash with their weaker companion\u2019s wind, they compress each other. In the eye of this storm forms a dense, cool environment in which the carbon-rich winds can condense into dust. The earliest carbon dust in the cosmos \u2013 the first of the material making up our own bodies \u2013 was made this way. <\/p>\n

The dust from the Wolf-Rayet is blown out in almost a straight line, and the orbital motion of the stars wraps it into a spiral-shaped nebula<\/a>, appearing exactly like water from a sprinkler when viewed from above.<\/p>\n

We expected Apep to look like one of these elegant pinwheel nebulas, discovered<\/a> by our colleague and co-author Peter Tuthill<\/a>. To our surprise, it did not.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a><\/p>\n

The \u2018pinwheel\u2019 nebula of the triple Wolf-Rayet star system WR104.
\n Peter Tuthill<\/a><\/p>\n

Equal rivals<\/p>\n

The new image was taken using JWST\u2019s infrared camera<\/a>, like the thermal cameras<\/a> used by hunters or the military. It represents hot material as blue, and colder material in green through to red. <\/p>\n

It turns out Apep isn\u2019t just one powerful star blasting a weaker companion, but two Wolf-Rayet stars. The rivals have near-equal strength winds, and the dust is spread out in a very wide cone<\/a> and wrapped into a wind-sock shape.<\/p>\n

When we originally described Apep in 2018<\/a>, we noted a third, more distant star, speculating whether it was also part of the system or a chance interloper along the line of sight.<\/p>\n

The dust appeared to be moving much slower than the winds, which was hard to explain. We suggested the dust might be carried on a slow, thick wind from the equator of a fast-spinning star, rare today but common in the early universe.<\/p>\n

The new, much more detailed data from JWST reveals three more dust shells zooming farther out, each cooler and fainter than the last and spaced perfectly evenly, against a background of swirling dust. <\/p>\n

\"Three<\/a><\/p>\n

The Apep nebula in false colour, displaying infrared data from JWST\u2019s MIRI camera.
\n Han et al.\/White et al.\/Dholakia; NASA\/ESA<\/p>\n

New data, new knowledge<\/p>\n

The JWST data are now published and interpreted in a pair of papers, one led by Caltech astronomer Yinuo Han<\/a>, and the other by Macquarie University Masters student Ryan White<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Han\u2019s paper<\/a> reveals how the nebula\u2019s dust cools, links the background dust to the foreground stars, and suggests the stars are farther away from Earth than we thought. This implies they are extraordinarily bright, but weakens our original claim about the slow winds and rapid rotation. <\/p>\n

In White\u2019s paper<\/a>, he develops a fast computer model for the shape of the nebula, and uses this to decode the orbit of the inner stars very precisely.<\/p>\n

He also noticed there\u2019s a \u201cbite\u201d taken out out of the dust shells, exactly where the wind of the third star would be chewing into them. This proves the Apep family isn\u2019t just a pair of twins \u2013 they have a third sibling.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

An illustration of the cavity carved by the third star companion in the Apep system.
\n White et al. (2025)<\/a><\/p>\n

Understanding systems like Apep tells us more about star deaths and the origins of carbon dust, but these systems<\/a> also have a fascinating beauty that emerges from their seemingly simple geometry.<\/p>\n

The violence of stellar death carves puzzles that would make sense to Newton and Archimedes, and it is a scientific joy to solve them and share them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The day before my thesis examination, my friend and radio astronomer Joe Callingham showed me an image we\u2019d…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":88835,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[159,783,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-88834","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-science","9":"tag-space","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114908674301043268","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88834","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=88834"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88834\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/88835"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=88834"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=88834"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=88834"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}