A new image captured by the James Webb Space Telescope shows rings of dust plumes created by the violent interactions between two stars.
A new image captured by the James Webb Space Telescope shows rings of dust plumes created by the violent interactions between two stars.
The image is part of new research that reveals how intense starlight can push matter around in space by focusing on a double-star system located 5000 light-years away from Earth in the Cygnus constellation.
The star system, called WR140, includes a Wolf-Rayet star and a blue supergiant star swirling around one another in an orbit that takes eight years to complete.
The blue supergiant is an O-type star, one of the most massive star types known. Only some massive stars evolve into a Wolf-Rayet as they approach the end of their life cycle. This stage lasts a few hundred thousand years.
Astronomers have observed the binary star system for two decades using the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii.
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Every eight years when the stars come close together, they release dust plumes that stretch thousands of times the distance between Earth and the sun.
Researchers observed the plumes to measure how starlight can impact matter for their study published in the journal Nature on Wednesday.
Light can exert a type of momentum called radiation pressure on matter, but it’s difficult to spot in space.
“It’s hard to see starlight causing acceleration because the force fades with distance, and other forces quickly take over,” first study author Yinuo Han, doctoral student at the University of Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy in the United Kingdom, said in a statement.
“To witness acceleration at the level that it becomes measurable, the material needs to be reasonably close to the star or the source of the radiation pressure needs to be extra strong.
“WR140 is a binary star whose ferocious radiation field supercharges these effects, placing them within reach of our high-precision data.”
