Mysterious rings in new Webb Space Telescope image puzzle astronomers

The Webb Telescope is certainly living up to its billing, and cost. Discoveries are rolling in continuously. This star with squarish rings is fascinating.

Could it be alien architecture?

Concentric ripples surrounding a distant star have a strange, squarish shape.

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The image, taken in July, was released on Twitter by citizen scientist Judy Schmidt, prompting a torrent of comments and head-scratching. It shows a star known as WR140 surrounded by regular ripple-like circles that gradually fade away. The circles, however, are not perfectly round, but have a somewhat square-like feel to them, prompting speculations about possible alien origins.

"I think it's just nature doing something that is simple, but when we look at it from only one viewpoint it seems impossible, at first, to understand that it is a natural phenomenon," Schmidt told Space.com in an email. "Why is it shaped the way it is? Why is it so regular?"

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"The six-pointed blue structure is an artifact due to optical diffraction from the bright star WR140 in this #JWST MIRI image," he wrote. "But red curvy-yet-boxy stuff is real, a series of shells around WR140. Actually in space. Around a star."

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Astronomers will know more soon thanks to a scientific paper currently under review about this mysterious phenomenon.

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WR140, located some 5,600 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Cygnus, is a so-called variable star that periodically dims and brightens. Whether the star's variability has anything to do with the mysterious ripples remains to be seen.

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"Yes, those nested 'squircular' rings are real," Ryan Lau, an astronomer at NOIRLab and principal investigator of the project that acquired the observations, replied to the Twitter thread. "Our paper on this has been submitted so please stay tuned for the full story."

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