Mystery over ‘space spiderweb’ 5,000 light-years from Earth finally solved by scientists

EXPERTS think they’ve got to the bottom of a “bonkers” deep space “spiderweb” mystery spotted 5,000 light-years away.

Some believed that aliens could be behind the strange ripples surrounding two distant hot stars.

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Scientists were left puzzled when the massive James Webb Space Telescope took a snap of it in July.

The star system, known officially as WR140, caused some head scratching because the ripples around it are a bit square-like instead of perfectly round as in most cases.

But now they’ve come up with a new theory which rules out any form of extraterrestrial interference.

Sadly, it’s something less exciting: dust.

Astronomers think the dust shells are there because the two hot stars – called Wolf-Rayet Star and O Star – come pretty close together during their eight year orbit.

This causes winds from each to compress, thereby producing bits of dust.

Interestingly, they tend to make more of it as they shift closer and further from each other, as opposed to when they’re very near, as some might expect.

So this is what causes the strange bumpiness in the ripples.

“Like clockwork, WR140 puffs out a sculpted smoke ring every eight years, which is then inflated in the stellar wind like a balloon,” said Professor Peter Tuthill from the Sydney Institute for Astronomy at the University of Sydney.

“Eight years later, as the binary returns in its orbit, another ring appears, the same as the one before, streaming out into space inside the bubble of the previous one, like a set of giant nested Russian dolls.”

Scientists have identified 17 concentric rings around WR140 in total, which extend outwards over a whooping 10trillion km.

The findings were published in the Nature journal.

James Webb Space Telescope

The James Webb Space Telescope was launched on December 25, 2021.

It’s the world’s largest and most powerful space telescope and it cost around $10billion (£7.3billion).

JWST currently orbits Earth-sun Lagrange Point 2 (L2), which is about 930,000 miles from Earth in the direction of Mars.

There, the telescope scours the night sky for faint infrared light, which could be visible from the first generation of stars and galaxies.

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