Unraveling a spiral stream of dusty embers from a massive binary stellar forge

With almost two decades of mid-infrared (IR) imaging from the largest observatories around the world including the Subaru Telescope, a team of astronomers was able to capture the spiral motion of newly formed dust streaming from the massive and evolved binary star system Wolf-Rayet (WR) 112.

WR 112 is a binary system composed of a massive star in the very late stage of stellar evolution losing a large amount of mass and another massive star at the main sequence. Dust is expected to be formed in the region where stellar winds from these two stars are colliding.

The study reveals the motion of the dusty outflow from the system and identifies WR 112 as a highly efficient dust factory that produces an entire Earth mass of dust every year.

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Source

Credit: Lau et al.

Sequence of 7 mid-IR (~10 micrometers) images of WR 112 taken between 2001 – 2019 by Gemini North, Gemini South, Keck, the Very Large Telescope (VLT), and the Subaru Telescope.

The length of the white line on each image corresponds to about 6800 astronomical units.

Source / Image Courtesy

Unraveling a Spiral Stream of Dusty Embers from a Massive Binary Stellar Forge

Unraveling a Spiral Stream of Dusty Embers from a Massive Binary Stellar Forge