Webb telescope discovers a new surprise about a rare pair of extreme stars

NASA‘S James Webb Space Telescope has revealed that an exceptionally rare star pair in the galaxy has a third partner – and it’s a monster.

The star system named Apep, named after the Egyptian god of chaos, consists of two wolf-rayet starsA type that burns blue-white and hot, producing powerful gas winds when approaching death. These stars are old, huge, and on the brink supernova explosion.

The Ephesus pair has surprised astronomers because of how rare Wolf-Rayet stars are. spaceOnly about 1,000 exist in the Milky Way, which contains hundreds of billions of stars, out of some Wolf-Rayets associated binary star systemsApep is the only one that has both falling into this category.

Now new telescope studies confirm that Apep has a third star – a supergiant, about 40 or 50 times more massive. SunThe two Wolf-Rayet stars were probably even more massive when they were younger, but they have since shrunk to 10 and 20 times the mass of our host star,

“Webb gives us a ‘smoking gun’ to prove that the third star is gravitationally bound to this system,” said lead author Ryan White of Macquarie University in Australia. a statement,

With Webb, astronomers were able to see two Wolf-Rayet stars blowing fierce winds that collide together and create carbon dust. Instead of one big cloud, Apep consists of a pile of four nested dust balls that look like ripples around a stone thrown into a pond. Each shell repeats the same pattern, indicating that the dust-forming process fires in a steady rhythm.

The balls retain their shape even after being drained approximately twice. light years outwards. But despite their predictability, spheres are not perfectly round. According to the research, the slight bump probably comes from the stars’ long, extended orbits, or from winds that blow faster in some directions than in others.

The James Webb Space Telescope revealed clear, layered dust balls shaped like two powerful stars.
Credit: NASA GSFC/CIL/Adriana Manrique Gutierrez Illustration

conclusion are described in two new letters published in The Astrophysical Journal,

“Seeing Webb’s new observations was like walking into a dark room and turning on the light,” Yinuo Han, lead author of one of the papers, said in a statement. “Everything came out.”

These spheres have formed over the last 700 years as the two stars repeatedly approach each other. Their gas collisions eject thick plumes of carbon dust at speeds of 1,200 to 2,000 miles per second. By measuring how fast the spheres move and how far apart they sit, researchers estimate that the two orbit each other once every 193 years.

As far as the third star is concerned, it revolves around the other two stars at a greater distance. As the dust spheres expand, this outer star passes through them, leaving a neat, pie-shaped gap in each sphere. Since this difference appears in the same place every time, researchers know it is part of the system.

The temperature of the dust, the shell space, and the overall brightness of the system point to Apep being much further away than previously studied – perhaps as much as 15,000 light years away in distance.

“We solved many mysteries with the Web,” Hahn said. “The remaining mystery is the exact distance of the stars from Earth, which will require future observations.”