#jwst

Dozens of gibbous shots stacked together to produce this beautiful 3D sphere look. 5000mp

What you’re looking at here is Apep, a trio of stars with distinct shells of dust swirling around them. This image was taken by our James Webb Space Telescope, and is the crispest view we have of the star system to date.

Named for the Egyptian god of chaos, the stars in this system are anything but peaceful and tranquil. Two of the three stars are part of a rare class of massive, evolved, luminous stars. That pair creates the shells as they orbit each other, flinging out dust at up to 2,000 miles per second. The third star is a massive supergiant with a much wider orbit, and the shock of its solar wind slices holes in these shells.

Before now, scientists had only been able to see one shell around Apep, despite hypothesizing the presence of more. But with the help of Webb’s keen eye, we have confirmed that Apep is layered like a cosmic onion, with four distinct shells now visible.

Learn more about Apep and see an animated visualization of the shells here.

A new image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope of a portion of the Helix Nebula highlights comet-like knots, fierce stellar winds, and layers of gas shed off by a dying star interacting with its surrounding environment. Webb’s image also shows the stark transition between the hottest gas to the coolest gas as the shell expands out from the central white dwarf.

Rho Ophiuchi cloud cluster

here it is compared to hubbles image: