The astronomers took 16 years to study the movements of the gas clouds.
The James Webb Space telescope has captured an image of intense light from a star pushing multiple dust plumes into space.
As the two approach, their 1,864 miles per second solar winds smash into each other, arcing a plume of material across space that slowly expands to form rings. As the plumes are only ejected when the stars are near each other, the spacing of the rings is set by their orbital period. This means the dust is made in regular intervals, and the cloud's rings can be counted like tree rings to find the age of the outermost ripple — with 20 visible rings amounting to 160 years of dust.
One of the stars in the duo is a Wolf-Rayet star, a type of rare, slowly-dying star that has lost its outer shell of hydrogen, leaving it to spew out gosts of ionized helium, carbon and nitrogen from its insides. These stars will explode as supernovas one day, but until then the radiation pressure produced by the light unfurls their burst contents, stretching them out like giant phantom jellyfish in the night sky.
The highly predictable timings of the puffs and their expansion over large distances gave the astronomers a unique opportunity to study the underlying physics of the ejections.
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