Friday, 28 November 2025
JWST Captures Apep
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has delivered a first-of-its-kind: a crisp mid-infrared image of a system of four serpentine spirals of dust, one expanding beyond the next in precisely the same pattern. (The fourth is almost transparent, at the edges of JWST's image.) Observations taken prior to JWST detected only one shell, and although outer shells were hypothesized, ground-based searches failed to uncover any. These shells were emitted over the last 700 years by two aging Wolf-Rayet stars in a system known as Apep, a nod to the Egyptian god of chaos.
JWST's image, combined with several years of data from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, narrowed down how often the pair swing by one another: once every 190 years. Over each incredibly long orbit, they pass closely for 25 years and form dust.
JWST also confirmed that there are three stars gravitationally bound to one another in this system. The dust ejected by the two Wolf-Rayet stars is “slashed” by a third star, a massive supergiant, which carves holes into each expanding cloud of dust from its wider orbit. (All three stars are shown as a single bright point of light in Webb’s image.)
JWST's mid-infrared image shows four coiled shells of dust around a pair of Wolf-Rayet stars known as Apep for the first time. Previous observations by other telescopes showed only one. Webb's data also confirmed that there are three stars gravitationally bound to one another.
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