NASA has shared a jaw-dropping new image of a binary pair of stars.
The US space agency snapped the image with its James Webb Space Telescope.
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Visible in the photograph is a binary pair of stars that are roughly 5,600 light-years away in the constellation of Cygnus.
Binary stars are two stars orbiting a common center of mass.
The brighter star is considered the primary, while the dimmer star is classified as the secondary.
Webb captured these two stars in stunning detail, with rings of light that radiate outwards.
These types of rings are produced by the interaction between the pair of stars.
Experts from Science Alert explained: “Their interactions produce precise periodic eruptions of dust that are expanding out in shells into the space around the pair over time.”
“These shells of dust are glowing in infrared, which has allowed an instrument as sensitive as Webb’s MIRI to resolve them in exquisite detail.”
The two stars pictured are part of a Wolf-Rayet star system, dubbed WR 140.
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Wolf-Rayet system
Wolf-Rayet stars are rare, incredibly hot and bright, and extremely old.
Both stars in the Wolf-Rayet system have fast stellar winds and elliptical orbits that cross over.
“This means the stars don’t describe nice, neat circles around each other, but ovals, with a point at which they are farthest apart from each other (apastron) and a point at which they are closest to each other (periastron),” Science Alert experts said.
“When the two stars enter periastron – a distance about a third greater than the distance between Earth and the Sun – they become close enough that their powerful winds collide.”
This collision, in turn, ejects material around the stars and generates radiation like X-rays.
WR 140 is also accompanied by a hot O-type star, which is a large blue-white star of spectral type O in the Yerkes classification system.
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.
