By Aahil
October 18, 2022
A remarkable cosmic view can be seen in a recent image from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope.
At least 17 concentric dust rings originating from a pair of stars forming a fingerprint like pattern.
The pair of stars are collectively known as Wolf-Rayet 140, and they are only 5,000 light-years away from Earth.
Each ring formed when stellar winds from two stars approached each other, compressing the gas and producing dust.
Earlier, we could only see two dust rings using ground-based telescopes, Lau said. Now we see at least 17 of them. We see at least 17 of them."
The Wolf-Rayet star is a dying O-type star that was born at least 25 times as massive as our Sun and is on the verge of collapsing into a black hole.
The Wolf-Rayet star produces powerful winds that propel massive amounts of gas into space as it is hotter than it was when it was young.
This process can cause the Wolf–Rayet star in this pair to lose more than half of its initial mass.