Tag Archives: Serpents

A rare celestial portrait captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has revealed an extraordinary and eerie sight: two massive dying stars enveloped in a vast, spiraling shroud of dust, intertwined like cosmic serpents. The image focuses on Apep, a rare Wolf-Rayet binary system, and was the result of a five-year wait by astronomers seeking to understand one of the …

The day before my thesis examination, my friend and radio astronomer Joe Callingham showed me an image we’d been awaiting for five long years – an infrared photo of two dying stars we’d requested from the Very Large Telescope in Chile. I gasped – the stars were wreathed in a huge spiral of dust, like a snake eating its own …