Paper (and press release) week! 🧪🔭 I'm so excited to share this awesome research result from @emmalieb.bsky.social and me, in a collaboration between @uofdenver.bsky.social and @noirlabastro.bsky.social. We made a JWST time lapse to watch the dust shells around WR140 expand! - ThreadSky

astroprofhoff.bsky.social • 39 days ago

Paper (and press release) week! 🧪🔭

I'm so excited to share this awesome research result from @emmalieb.bsky.social and me, in a collaboration between @uofdenver.bsky.social and @noirlabastro.bsky.social. We made a JWST time lapse to watch the dust shells around WR140 expand!

Reposted from spacetelescope.bsky.social

Astronomers using #NASAWebb identified two stars that generate carbon-rich dust in our Milky Way. When the stars in Wolf-Rayet 140 swing by one another on their elongated orbits, their winds collide and produce dust that expands outward: webbtelescope.pub/42bqgOP #AAS245 🔭 🧪

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astroprofhoff.bsky.social•39 days ago

Story time: Back in 2022, JWST MIRI took this gorgeous image revealing 17+ concentric dusty rings around this colliding wind binary star in the Milky Way. Astronomers knew the system was producing dust, but JWST's mid-IR sensitivity gave us the clearest view yet of its immediate neighborhood.

astroprofhoff.bsky.social•39 days ago

Where do these rings come from? Well, both stars in this system have strong stellar winds, and one, a type called a Wolf-Rayet star, has a lot of carbon in its atmosphere and wind. When the stars get close to each other in their orbits, the winds collide and compress this gas into molecules.

astroprofhoff.bsky.social•39 days ago

The carbon-rich molecules (which astronomers call "dust") then expand outward in the stellar winds, while retaining some angular motion from the stars. Every 8 years, a new puff of dust occurs, creating the regularly spaced shells (which are 3D, but we see them in cross-section).

astroprofhoff.bsky.social•39 days ago

So we had a good picture of the system, but we didn't know much about how the shells move. To study that, our colleagues used JWST to take another image in 2023, 1 year after the first one. Sure enough, the dust is expanding outward! It's so cool to see astronomical changes on a human timescale!

astroprofhoff.bsky.social•39 days ago

This was supposed to be an animated gif, but it didn't work. Here's a video instead (from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rRRhieyxAU ):

astroprofhoff.bsky.social•39 days ago

After careful image alignment, @emmalieb.bsky.social mapped the shell locations along 3 different directions and calculated the expansion speed. It's ~2700 km/s, almost 1% the speed of light! And it's not slowing down as it goes, so there's not much interaction with local interstellar material.

astroprofhoff.bsky.social•39 days ago

We also looked at some of the blobby or lumpy regions in the shells and found a) they persist in a given shell over time, and b) they recur from shell to shell. This tells us they are intrinsic to the dust formation process, and contain clues to instabilities in the colliding winds.

somedonuts.bsky.social•38 days ago

WR 140 is so interesting. About a year ago I went to a San Francisco Amateur Astronomers lecture with Dr Thomas Madura talking about the early JWST WR 140 data. Cool part was that he brought 3D printed models of the dust shells. Same models he uses when lecturing to visually impaired audiences.

astroprofhoff.bsky.social•38 days ago

Yeah! I meant to link to the 3D printer files!
https://www.stsci.edu/~carolc/3dastronomy/galleryjwstmore.html#WR%20140

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