Using the James Webb Space Telescope, researchers revealed four spiraling dust shells around the Apep system, formed over the past seven centuries by two Wolf-Rayet stars in a rare wide orbit, with a third massive supergiant shaping the dust pockets.

Visualization and simulations show three stars gravitationally bound, driving a complex dust-formation process powered by colliding stellar winds.

The dust shells arise as the two Wolf-Rayet stars approach and pass each other roughly every 190 years, their colliding winds mixing and ejecting material into spirals that persist for about 25 years with each cycle.

NASA and collaborators released the visualization on November 19, 2025, with credits to image and simulation teams from STScI, Caltech, Macquarie University, and STScI’s visualization and processing teams.

Eight years of Very Large Telescope measurements, combined with Webb imagery, enabled mapping of the rings and shells’ expansion speeds to determine the system’s orbital dynamics.

Apep stands out as the Milky Way’s only known bound system containing two Wolf-Rayet stars of these types, underscoring its rarity as an astrophysical laboratory.

The dust is predominantly amorphous carbon and extremely dense, with production speeds of 1,200 to 2,000 miles per second, remaining hot enough for Webb’s MIRI to detect in mid-infrared.

The release provides downloadable 3D video assets in two resolutions (3840×2160 and 1920×1080) at 60 FPS that showcase the spiraling dust shells around Apep.

The discovery emphasizes Apep as an exceptional laboratory for studying dust production from colliding winds, noting such systems are exceedingly rare and that future observations are needed to pin down the system’s distance from Earth.

Authors Yinuo Han and Ryan White refined the orbital geometry by combining Webb imaging with eight years of VLT shell-expansion data, confirming the three stars are bound and that the third star’s influence is crucial to the observed dust structures.

Estimated masses place the two Wolf-Rayet stars at roughly 10–20 solar masses each and the supergiant at about 40–50 solar masses, with the system likely ending in supernovae or gamma-ray bursts for one or both Wolf-Rayet stars.

Webb confirms the third companion is physically bound by its intersection with the dust shells, a finding described as the study’s smoking gun.