JWST Image of Rings Around Star WR140 Leaves Astrophysicists Baffled!

^{With its mid-infrared instrument (MIRI), the James Webb Space Telescope captured the star WR140 surrounded by strange concentric shells that gradually fade away.. (Image credit: NASA/ESA /CSA /Ryan Lau /JWST ERS Team /Judy Schmidt)}

_{By Dr. Inés Urdaneta, Physicist at Resonance Science Foundation}

An image taken by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in July 2022 showing a star named Wolf-Rayet 140 (WR 140) surrounded by regular ripple-like circles that gradually fade away, was released on Twitter by scientist Judy Schmidt. Star WR140 is in the Cygnus constellation and resides around 5,600 light-years from Earth. The image ignited a torrent of comments, making astronomers and astrophysicists scratch their heads over this unexplained observation.

Wolf-Rayet stars are rare, only 600 have been found, and they’re very short-lived, generating powerful winds that push huge amounts of gas and dust into space, while loosing most of their mass in the process. In this particular case of WR 140’s, the star has a unique elongated orbit. The shells of dust are glowing in infrared, allowing an instrument as sensitive as Webb's MIRI to resolve them in detail.

The blue rays of light coming out from the star are probably an optical effect, but the rings forming around it and revealing the presence of dust and a ripple-like circles pattern in space, are very real. And at the center of the image, the system is actually a binary pair of stars: the WR140 and a O-type star. Their interactions are thought to produce precise periodic eruptions of dust that expand out over time in shells into the space around the pair. The binary star's orbit has a 8 year period; each 8 years the wind collision and dust production occur such that you can count the rings (like the rings of a tree) to establish the age of the most visible external dust shell. A research involving 34 teams is studying the data obtained from this system to find out if they can reproduce the shells with current models, and their results are expected soon. 

In the meantime, we will address a second possibility which could also help explain the observed rings revealing the presence of dust and a ripple-like circles pattern in space around the binary star. These shells make us think of ripples in water when a rock falls in. The analogy of these rock-induced  ripples in space are the so-called gravitational waves that happen from very energetic events, for instance, the collision of extremely dense objects such as black holes, pulsars, etc, which are supposed to be intense enough as to produce them. Hence, it’s a transitory effect that should fade off in matter of seconds or less.

The image below shows the gravitational wave spectrum and its known potential sources, expected to produce detectable gravitational waves. The horizontal axis depicts the frequency and the wave period, which is the inverse of frequency (on a logarithmic scale) with the colors representing the corresponding wavelengths (red = longer, purple = shorter). 

^{The detectors shown in the image above are those existing or planned. (Source: www.scienceinschool.org/article/2017/gravitational-waves-taxonomy/)}

Concerning the duration of the ripples or distortions of space-time, we can look at the first three gravitational waves detected on 14 September 2015, 26 December 2015 and 4 January 2017 (from top to bottom in the image below), all produced by merging black holes. These traces show that each signal builds up gradually and decays rapidly once the merging happened.

^{First three gravitational waves detected on 14 September 2015, 26 December 2015 and 4 January 2017 (from top to bottom), all produced by merging black holes. The LIGO Scientific Collaboration and the Virgo Collaboration}

The horizontal axis in the above plot shows the time from when the signal was first seen in the detector, and we see that in the longest case (GW151226), the perturbation lasted 1.65 seconds approximately. The three vertical axes show the tiny distortions registered, the so-called ripples or gravitational waves (GW). We can see that in fact, they are very small.  (To learn more about the JWST, please read our RSF article entitled Evidence of Black Holes Forming Galaxies is Mounting!).

JWST is not equipped of a gravitational wave detector because what we understand as gravitational waves are extremely small mechanical changes or distortions in the fabric of space-time, that require extremely complex experimental setups and very large components, in order to perceive them. Additionally, detection of GWs require at least two different devices recording the same effect simultaneously, as to ensure the reliability of the detection.

JWST detects electromagnetic (light) signatures only, which could also be associated to the cosmological events producing gravitational waves. It captures light in various electromagnetic regimes, providing images with extreme resolution. It is even able to perform spectroscopic analysis of light as to determine the chemical components in the regions observed. This is extremely useful to know if a planet has the chemicals/biological compounds required for life as we understand it (atmosphere, water, organics compounds, etc).

In the case of the binary WR140 system, we are talking about two stars which are orbiting each other, there is no real collision between the stars, but between their stellar winds. Therefore, if what we see in the image of star WR140 are not the GW expected and predicted by Einstein Relativity theory, then, what else could they be? it is too soon to say, they could just be dust orbiting around the binary system due to the mechanism mentioned earlier (which results are to be expected soon), though, what if these rings are providing evidence of a deeper phenomenon? The dust in the rings is distributed in such a way that it seems as if the dust was revealing standing waves in the fabric of space-time, as they were part of the system as a whole. Can current cosmological models explain them satisfactorily? Is the dust revealing a different type of “GW” in the sense that it is a standing wave, or orbitals, not predicted by Einstein’s relativity theory?

In his work with late Elizabeth Rauscher (former physicist and researcher at Berkeley University), entitled The Origin of Spin: A Consideration of Torque and Coriolis Forces in Einstein’s Field Equations and Grand Unification Theory and published in January 2004, Nassim Haramein describes a fundamental torque in the structure of spacetime from which the angular momentum spin dynamics of cosmological objects to subatomic particles emerges. The Haramein-Rauscher model (depicted to the right in the image below) predicted such "ripples" in the region around a black hole (and by extension stars with singularities at their center), as shown by the blue standing waves in the section inside the event horizon.

To include torque in the context of Einstein’s field equations, Haramein and Rauscher had to modify the usual Minkowski space and utilize a U₄ bubble which is equivalent to a double torus. The solution was eventually described as the Haramein-Rauscher Metric [1] and incorporated the secondary effect of the gyroscopic torque force called the Coriolis effect. Therefore, a torque force was incorporated in the stress energy tensor of Einstein field equations which in turn modified the metrical space.

Figure 1(a) below is a topological representation of the Haramein-Rauscher solution resulting from the addition of torque and Coriolis force terms as an amendment to Einstein’s field equations, which modifies the Kerr-Newman solution. The Lorentz invariance conditions are reconciled by utilizing a modified metrical space, which is not the usual Minkowski space, but the U₄ space. This space is a consequence of the Coriolis force acting as a secondary effect, which is generated from the torque term in the stress-energy tensor. An introduction to Einstein’s field equations can be read in our RSF article entitled The Vacuum Catastrophe.   

Figure 1(b). shows a Coriolis type dynamic of the dual U₁ x U₁ spacetime manifold. The form of the metric produces the dual torus. This solution reveals new features in the system that where not present in the original Einsteins field equations, such as the standing waves in the region inside an event horizon (blue waves in the image above), or the presence of a hole in north and south poles, precisely where jets have been observed coming out of cosmological structures such as quasars and black holes.  

Because of this amendment to Einstein’s field equations, the resulting dynamics of the system could explain features such as the jets ejected from black holes. In the case of a quasar black hole (image below), the jet can extend approximately 1,000,000 (10⁶) light years.

^{Relativistic jets emitted from quasars and black holes of all scale}

These jets are observed as well at the north and south poles of supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies and in pulsars and quasars alike. These jets are typically spinning extremely rapidly and ejecting material in a high percentile of the speed of light.

The new Haramein-Rauscher metric could explain the standing waves around the massive object star WR140 as well (see the standing waves depicted in blue inside the event horizon of Fig. 1(a), suggesting that the event horizon acts as a boundary for a resonance chamber), which would mean that there should be a singularity in the interior of this star. This is something that Nassim Haramein has alluded for more than 25 years; stars are black holes with very thick ergospheres, and therefore their emission spectra obey the black body radiation law.

Space-time bends and twists on itself in a vortex-spiral. This generates spin, a kinetic moment. [...] This is the source of the spin of everything. This is an appropriate way to describe the physics of angular momentum in the universe in a factual way. So the addition of the torsional moment to the space-time produces a very different picture of a perfect sphere. It induces a torus structure, i.e. a sphere with two holes in the middle, at the north and south poles. - Nassim Haramein

The Haramein-Rauscher amendment to the gravitational metric was as well applied to particle physics via Lie algebra group models and shown to be unified with the quantum world by the specific geometry of a cuboctahedron 24 element group related to the U₄ double torus bubble depicted in Fig. 1(b).  Yet, exactly how the cuboctahedron of the structure of spacetime at the quantum scale was generated was unclear until the generalized gravitational holographic solution was found [2,3,4].

RSF in perspective:

The Haramein-Rauscher model is the equivalent of the description of a gradient density change between cosmological scale and quantum scale, producing a fundamental torque in the vacuum density at the source of spin. This model belongs to a category that could be called continuous picture, because it happens in the frame of general relativity, which is a continuous representation of spacetime. 

In the context of the structure of spacetime described from a discrete representation in terms of spherical Planck units that quantify space and from which mass, fields and forces emerge.(known as Haramein's generalized holographic model), when we consider the holographic solution findings, we can imagine the dual torus structure being generated in the vicinity of the “fluid dynamics” of the Plancks slime, orbiting at high velocity in a region of space and generating highly structured vortexes or “jets” at its poles. It was recently proved that black holes support vortexes structures within.

In Haramein’s model, these are the factories from which Planck oscillators are spun into coherent co-moving regions that we call protons and form atomic structure. These dynamics of the surrounding Planck vacuum oscillator medium in the vicinity of a large vorticular structure of spacetime may be the cause of the electron/positron polarity makeup of the atomic electron cloud.

Elizabeth Rauscher was a former physicist and researcher with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the Stanford Research Institute, and NASA. As it is mentioned in wikipedia, she co-founded the Berkeley Fundamental Fysiks Group in 1975; an informal group of physicists who met weekly to discuss quantum mysticism and the philosophy of quantum physics. An interesting remark mentioned in wikipedia is that David Kaiser argued in his book, How the Hippies Saved Physics that this group helped to nurture ideas which were unpopular at the time within the physics community, but which later, in part, formed the basis of quantum information science.

Note to the Reader: some parts of this article are contained in Module 4, section 4.6.2 of our free online Unified Science Course. Check it out here!

References:

[1] Haramein, N., and Rauscher, E. A. (2005). The orgin of spin: A consideration of torque and coriolis forces in Einstein’s field equations and grand unification theory. Beyond The Standard Model: Searching for Unity in Physics, 1, 153-168.

[2] Haramein, N. (2012). Quantum Gravity and the Holographic Mass, Physical Review & Research International, ISSN: 2231-1815, Page 270-292 

[3] Haramein, N & Val Baker, A. K. F. (2019). Resolving the Vacuum Catastrophe: A Generalized Holographic Approach, Journal of High Energy Physics, Gravitation and Cosmology, Vol.05 No.02(2019), Article ID:91083, 13 pages

[4] Val baker, A.K.F, Haramein, N. and Alirol, O. (2019). The Electron and the Holographic Mass Solution, Physics Essays, Vol 32, Pages 255-262.