James Webb Telescope Rleases Clearest Images Of Neptune’s Rings
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has produced the clearest images of Neptune’s rings for the first time in 30 years. This was reported on the official website of the organization.
A new space telescope has examined the famous double WR 140 in never-before-seen detail. He was able to see at once 17 asymmetric dust rings surrounding a pair of massive stars and get their spectrum. By modeling their rotation and particle flows emanating from the participants in this tandem, scientists confirmed their assumptions about how such unusual rings arise. An article about this was published in the journal Nature Astronomy, and the work is briefly described in a NASA press release.
The WR 140 system is located at a distance of about five thousand light years and includes two massive stars. One of them belongs to the blue giants of the spectral class O. The second is the Wolf-Rayet star, also a giant, but in the late stages of evolution. It has almost completely exhausted its hydrogen shells and burns out helium, due to which the star is extremely hot, strongly radiates and emits a powerful stream of stellar wind particles with a rather high content of “heavy” elements, including oxygen, nitrogen and carbon. In WR 140, a pair of giants are very close to each other, moving in an elongated orbit with a period of less than eight of our years.
A strong stellar wind is emitted by both members of this extreme tandem. Each time they come close, their ejected streams meet and the high pressure causes the particles to condense into dust. And due to the peculiarities of the orbital motion of stars, these areas look like a series of open concentric rings. Ground-based telescopes allow you to consider one, maximum – two of them. However, the new space observatory James Webb during recent observations distinguished as many as 17 rings, extending up to a light year away from the binary system itself.
In future studies, scientists want to further study both Neptune and Triton.
