What we see in the image captured by the James Webb is about 5000 light years away, what is in the center of the image are two stars, that these stars had rings, it was already known before the launch of the James web, but only you could see two rings the James Webb is so powerful and has such an enormous observation capacity that it allows you to see up to 17 rings.
The question is where did they come from? Well, they are the product of one of the rarest phenomena in the known universe. The key is in the two stars. On the one hand, we have a star with approximately 10 times the mass of the Sun and the other is a rare, very rare thing is a Wolf-Rayet-type star with a mass about 30 times that of the Sun.
It is so rare that it is the one that gives its name to what we see, astronomers know these two stars, this binary object, as Wolf-Rayet 140, Wolf-Rayet are special O-type stars, they are very massive, they have at least 25 times the mass of the sun, they are very hot five or six times hotter than the sun, they are also very bright, two of the brightest stars in the night sky that we see are of this type, they are also particularly rare and live intensely and much less time that the sun, when dying these stars collapse and its nucleus transforms into a black hole.
We know that the sun expels the solar wind and ejections of particles that when they collide with the Earth's magnetosphere cause solar storms or geomagnetic storms, this type of Wolf-Rayet star also causes winds and ejections, but on a much larger scale, pushing enormous amounts of gas to space.
Astronomers believe that the largest star, the Wolf-Rayet type, may have lost more than half of its original mass through this process, we are talking about a huge volume, a volume that is several times the mass of the entire solar system and much of that material is what we see forming the Rings.
The creation of these rings is very curious, rings are not seen in all stars of this type, what happens here is that an effect is formed that is created when the two stars approach each other, the orbit of the Wolf-Rayet Star does not it is circular but elongated, every 8 years the stars get closer and their stellar winds collide, that is when the magic of the transformation of gas into dust occurs.
Transforming gas into dust is something like turning flour into bread, it requires specific conditions and ingredients, the most common element found in stars is hydrogen and it cannot be transformed into dust by itself, but because the Wolf-Rayet stars shed so much mass they also expel other more complex elements that are normally found inside stars, elements like oxygen, silicon or carbon, more familiar to us since they serve to make planets or create our bodies.
Those elements that go in the form of plasma within the stellar wind, cool as they travel through space and then when the winds of the two collide, they are compressed in this way, a ring of dust arises every eight years, then the stars move away in its orbit and a vacuum is created as the ring expands through space.
So what we see is similar to the growth rings of a tree, each one marking eight years of creation of dust and materials, materials that over the eons will serve to create new stars and planets.
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