‘Cosmic Spiderweb’ Mystery Solved
A puzzling image from the James Webb Space Telescope, which had astronomers stumped for months, has finally been explained.
A BIZARRE IMAGE of the distant star surrounded by concentric squarish ripples, captured by the James Webb Space Telescope in July 2022, had baffled astronomers worldwide — even triggering frenzied Internet speculation it might be evidence of an alien megastructure light-years across.
The image — of the binary star system known as WR140 some 5,600 light-years away — was captured shortly after the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) started science operations and began releasing its first full batch of images. And it provoked spirited discussion online, with some theorising the giant ripples surrounding the star might have alien origins. Mark McCaughrean, a senior adviser at the European Space Agency and a member of the JWST Working Group, described the image as “bonkers”.
But in two scientific papers, published simultaneously in Nature and Nature Astronomy, two Australian astronomers explain that the 17 strange concentric rings seen girdling the star are actually a series of mammoth dust shells created by the cyclic interaction between a pair of hot stars, one of them a dying Wolf-Rayet, locked together in a tight orbit.
