A nested series of dusty spirals is captured swirling around a mighty triple star system containing two of the rarest stars in the galaxy in a new image from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).
The triple system is nicknamed Apep, after the Egyptian god of chaos, and cosmic chaos. It's on dramatic display in JWST's new mid-infrared image, which makes the object look like an immense cosmic embryo. Two of the stars in Apep are Wolf-Rayet stars, which are massive and extremely hot stars that live a life bordering on instability, with powerful stellar winds carrying huge clumps of material from them, exposing a helium-, nitrogen- and carbon-rich interior. Only about 1,000 Wolf-Rayet stars are known in our Milky Way galaxy, among more than 100 billion other stars.
