Webb’s Stunning View of Apep Shows a Rare Triple-Star System Wrapped in Spirals

At the end of 2025, NASA's James Webb Space Telescope gave us an amazing look at Apep, a unique triple-star system that's pretty far away. It features a couple of huge, dying Wolf–Rayet stars alongside a supergiant, all circling each other in a complex dance surrounded by dusty spiral shells. The mid-infrared images from Webb highlight a swirling 'cosmic embryo' filled with carbon-rich dust. This work, led by Yinuo Han from Caltech and Ryan White from Macquarie University, provided one of the clearest views yet of colliding stellar winds.

A Unique Triple-Star System

According to NASA, Webb images show Apep contains two massive Wolf–Rayet stars and a more distant supergiant. The Wolf–Rayet stars orbit roughly every 190 years — far longer than usual for such binaries.

When the stars draw near, their strong winds collide to form thick clouds of carbon-rich dust. Over several centuries, these winds have generated four nested spiral shells visible in Webb's mid-infrared image. The distant third star carves a funnel-shaped hole through the dust as it orbits, revealing its presence even though all three stars merge to a point in telescope images.

Cosmic Dust and Future Stars

Wolf–Rayet stars are rare, massive stars nearing the end of their lives. In Apep, abundant carbon dust is produced by collisions between the pair's stellar winds; this dust stays warm and infrared-bright (thisis.caltech.edu).

Such winds throw the dust out in almost regular spiral shells that act like a "fossil record" of the stars' activity. Shells extend tens of trillions of kilometers, effectively seeding the Milky Way with carbon and other building blocks of future planets and stars.