A team of astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope has captured a breathtaking new image of the star system Apep, which is unlike anything previously seen. Located 8,000 light-years from Earth, Apep consists of two dying stars spewing their innards at each other in a spiral of dust.
The system was discovered in 2018 and was nicknamed after the ancient Egyptian serpent god of chaos and destruction due to its unique shape. However, new research has revealed that it contains not one, but two Wolf-Rayet stars, which are slowly dying stars that lose their outer hydrogen shells and spew ionized helium, carbon, and nitrogen from their insides.
The James Webb Telescope’s Mid-Infrared Instrument captured the system in unprecedented detail, revealing a third star chomping on the dust shrouds of its dying siblings. The team’s findings were published in two papers on the preprint server arXiv, but have not yet been peer-reviewed.
“We expected Apep to look like one of these elegant pinwheel nebulas,” said study co-author Benjamin Pope. “To our surprise, it did not.” Instead, the researchers found that the system is more complex and unusual than initially thought, with near-equal strength winds from the two Wolf-Rayet stars and a third star carving out a cavity in the dust.
Studying Apep could provide insights into how stars die and the carbon dust they leave behind. “The violence of stellar death carves puzzles that would make sense to Newton and Archimedes, and it is a scientific joy to solve them and share them,” Pope said.
Source: https://www.livescience.com/space/2-stars-in-serpent-god-of-destruction-system-are-hurling-their-blazing-guts-at-each-other-james-webb-telescope-reveals