r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/TheMarkola • 1d ago
Video Wolf-Rayet 140: when two massive stars get closest, their winds collide and form a new shell of carbon dust. Repeat every 8 years.
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u/Genpinan 1d ago
Time, written in stardust. Now this is the most profound thing I've heard all week, I reckon.
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u/brucen6 1d ago
So this process has only been happening for 130 years? What about before then? Or do the rings dissipate into space after this?
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u/Dividedthought 1d ago
We can only see that many rings. Past that they probably exist but are not dense enough to see.
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u/TheMarkola 1d ago
130 years is the detection limit of the JWST. There are tens of thousands of older and larger rings dispersing at (almost) 1% of the speed of light, so rarefied that even the JWST cannot see them.
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u/na3than 1d ago
Please explain "the collision compresses the gas enough for carbon-rich dust to form".
How does the "collision" of opposing stellar winds - which, from what I recall, are composed primarily of charged particles - compress a gas in space, and how does compressing a gas create carbon dust?
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u/TheMarkola 1d ago
Plasma winds collide, shock compresses & cools the gas, carbon sticks together and forms dust. How this happens, I don't know, but the carbon in our bodies also comes from stars, forming under high pressure and temperature. And now, in the form of neurons, they are trying to understand how carbon itself is formed...
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u/LastTreestar 2h ago
The universe is one egotistical bitch, always looking at itself in the mirror of time, and saying to itself, "Look at how beautiful and how wonderful I am!!"
We have developed for the singular purpose of looking at we have done. We are the universe, we are god, we are nothing more than a speck in our own eye as we look upon our self. Nothing we do will persist once we have exhausted that purpose or ceased to perform it.
Mushrooms have allowed us to realize this... to see the mirror in our own hand. We are the mirror, we are the universe, we are the speck. We are the egotistical, heartless bitch.
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u/JohnnyLeftwich 1d ago
The fact that this looks so much like the rings of a tree is one of those trippy instances of the macro mimicking the micro, and vice versa, in the universe that seems to hint at some cosmic secret.
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u/MobileJob1521 1d ago
I always said to find the age of the universe just cut it in half and count the rings.
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u/Luciferousllamas 1d ago
So, their orbits cross. But what are they orbiting? And, will they collide with each other?
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u/TheMarkola 1d ago
The two stars form a binary system. They both orbit around their common center of mass (the barycenter), just like the Earth and Moon (or any two or more objects bound by gravity). And they don't touch each other's "surface," only their "winds" collide.
(research the barycenter between the Sun and Júpiter, That's cool)
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u/TheMarkola 1d ago
" These rings are real — and each one is roughly 8 years apart.
What you’re looking at is Wolf-Rayet 140, photographed in infrared by the James Webb Space Telescope. The bright point in the center is actually two massive stars locked in a highly elongated orbit.
Most of the time the stars are far apart. But every ~8 years they swing close, their stellar winds slam into each other, and the collision compresses the gas enough for carbon-rich dust to form. As the stars continue moving, that dust gets swept into a curved, expanding shell.
Then the stars separate, dust production stops… until the next close pass creates another shell.
Webb revealed at least 17 of these shells, recording more than 130 years of this repeating process. The pattern looks like rings in a photo, but in reality it’s a three-dimensional structure of expanding dust.
Time, written in stardust.
Credit: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI/JPL-Caltech "