The James Webb Space Telescope's mid-infrared observations have revealed unprecedented detail in the bizarre system known as WR 140. Two massive stars dance at its centre: an O star emitting a weaker wind and a Wolf-Rayet star blowing off a stronger, carbon-enriched wind. For a few months every eight years, when the two stars come closest together in their mutual orbit, their winds slam into each other to make carbonenriched dust, the building block of planets and possibly life itself. Previous images have shown two nested dust shells around the stars. In the new images, Webb revealed 17 nested shells of dust, representing 130 years of close approaches and dust-forming events. Ryan Lau (NSF's NOIRLab) and colleagues published the results in the journal Nature Astronomy. They also took a spectrum…
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Australian Sky & Telescope (Digital) - 1 Issue, March 2023