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Carbon-rich cosmic dust comes from different sources and spreads out into space, where it\u2019s necessary for life and for the formation of rocky planets like ours. When astronomers aim their telescopes at objects in the sky, they often have to contend with this cosmic dust that obscures their targets and confounds their observations. <\/p>\n
One reason the JWST was built is to see through some of this dust with its infrared vision and unlock new insights into astrophysical processes. In new work, the JWST was tasked with observing the dust itself. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n The Wolf\u2013Rayet binary WR 140 is about 5,000 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus. In 2022, researchers published results in Nature Astronomy revealing details about the binary star. The results showed that the stellar winds from both stars regularly collide, producing rings of carbon-rich dust that expand outward from the stars. <\/p>\n \u201cWe are used to thinking about events in space taking place slowly, over millions or billions of years. In this system, the observatory is showing that the dust shells are expanding from one year to the next.\u201d<\/p>\n Jennifer Hoffman, co-author, University of Denver<\/cite><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n \u201cMassive colliding-wind binaries that host a Wolf\u2013Rayet (WR) star present a potentially important source of dust and chemical enrichment in the interstellar medium,\u201d the authors wrote, noting that the dust\u2019s chemical composition and how it survives are still not understood. \u201cThe carbon-rich Wolf\u2013Rayet binary WR 140 presents an ideal astrophysical laboratory for investigating these questions, given its well-defined orbital period and predictable dust-formation episodes every 7.93?years around periastron passage,\u201d the authors explained in their research. <\/p>\n The environment near these stars when they\u2019re close to one another is chaotic, even hostile. The winds from these evolved stars are chemically rich, and when the stronger wind from the WR star collides with the wind from the OB star, the gas is compressed, and dust is produced. Since the dust is only produced at periastron, the dust forms discrete rings. \u201cGalactic colliding-wind WC (Wolf-Rayet stars of the carbon sequence) binaries with resolvable circumstellar dust nebulae, therefore, provide important laboratories to study this dust-formation process, where observations over the past few decades have demonstrated how dust formation is regulated by the orbit of the binary system,\u201d the authors of the 2022 paper explain. <\/p>\n \n\n