RS Puppis, One Of The Brightest Cepheid Variable Stars © Hubble

RS Puppis, one of the brightest Cepheid variable stars © Hubble

A Dusty Fingerprint in Space

An image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope shows a bright dot at the center of star-filled black space. The bright dot is actually two stars meeting, as their orbits bring them together every 8 years. The stellar pair are surrounded by 17 rings of gas and dust that appear orangish gray. The rings have a slight rectangular shape and are very clear and defined starting at about 1 o’clock on a clockface. The rings start to break up a bit to our view traveling clockwise around the image. As you arrive at the 12:40 position, only parts of about six rings can be seen as they disappear from view.

A new image from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope reveals a remarkable cosmic sight: at least 17 concentric dust rings emanating from a pair of stars. Just 5,300 light-years from Earth, the star duo are collectively known as Wolf-Rayet 140. Each ring was created when the two stars came close together and their stellar winds (streams of gas they blow into space) collided so forcefully that some of the gas was compressed into dust. The stars' orbits bring them together about once every eight years, and forms a half-shell of dust that looks like a ring from our perspective. Like a cosmic fingerprint, the 17 rings reveal more than a century of stellar interactions—and the "fingerprint" belonging to Wolf-Rayet 140 may be equally unique. Other Wolf-Rayet stars produce dust, but no other pair are known to produce rings quite like Wolf-Rayet 140.

Learn more about Wolf-Rayet 140.

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Neptune’s rings in infrared © JWST

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Stephan’s Quintet/ Carina/ Southern Ring © JWST

Stephan’s Quintet/ Carina/ Southern Ring © JWST

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Jupiter Rotates : Observe the graceful twirl of our Solar System’s largest planet. Many interesting features of Jupiter’s enigmatic atmosphere, including dark belts and light zones, can be followed in detail. A careful inspection will reveal that different cloud layers rotate at slightly different speeds. The famous Great Red Spot is not visible at first – but soon rotates into view. Other smaller storm systems occasionally appear. As large as Jupiter is, it rotates in only 10 hours. Our small Earth, by comparison, takes 24 hours to complete a spin cycle. The featured high-resolution time-lapse video was captured over five nights earlier this month by a mid-sized telescope on an apartment balcony in Paris, France. Since hydrogen and helium gas are colorless, and those elements compose most of Jupiter’s expansive atmosphere, what trace elements create the observed colors of Jupiter’s clouds remains a topic of research. via NASA

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the new composite james webb image is so beautiful ive been staring at it for 10 minutes straight