[The Epoch Times, September 12, 2022](The Epoch Times reporter Linda compiled and reported) The James Webb Space Telescope recently discovered a mystery: It captured a ring of light emitted by a bright star in the shape of a “round and square”. rather than the usual round shape.
In the eight months since its launch, the Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has sent back a series of photos of the universe’s exciting and mysterious structures, as well as extremely ancient galaxies and dying stars, as it explores the mysteries of the universe’s early formation. The JWST has 100 times the observational power of the Hubble Telescope, and it captures images that sometimes exceed our current understanding of the universe.
The latest photo is of WR140’s stellar halo. As image processing expert Judy Schmidt noted in a retweet of the images on August 29, the halos fan out from the star’s bright white center in a spiral ring and several rays. The rings aren’t perfectly round, they look more like squares with rounded corners, and even astronomers don’t know why.
“I thought it was just nature doing something simple, but it seemed impossible at first to understand that it was a natural phenomenon when we only looked at it from one angle,” Schmidt told Space.com, which reported the incident. strange thing. “Why is it shaped like this? Why is it so regular?”
According to Mark McCaughrean, an interdisciplinary scientist with the Webb Telescope Science Working Group, the rings are “so bizarre.”
“In this image, the six spiky blue structures are due to optical refraction due to optical diffraction from the bright star WR140,” he tweeted, “but red, curved, and quadratic. The square, layered structures actually exist in space.”
“Those nested ‘squircular’ rings are real ,” and added that he and his colleagues have a pending paper on the subject that may provide more understanding of the strange ring phenomenon.
Aside from the puzzling halo, WR140 is not actually one, but a pair of stars: one is Wolf–Rayet, an ancient, rapidly depleting star; the other One is an O-type star, which is large, bright but short-lived. As the pair of stars orbit each other, they produce cosmic dust as they approach each other every 7.94 years. The dust is thrown into nearby space to form the ring structure seen here, and the JWST’s infrared capabilities can capture it.
This is just the latest of many discoveries that JWST has to offer us; while these oddly-shaped halos may not be aliens, maybe the next one will be. ◇#
Responsible editor: Ye Ziwei