These are perhaps the most exciting, certainly the most unusual images to be released from the James Webb Space Telescope – concentric rings have never been seen before.

A pair of studies have now clarified that the star at the centre is actually two stars orbiting each other in a very eccentric or elliptical orbit so that they come very close to each other every 8 years. When this happens a massive amount of dust is released and that dust shell is then pushed outward on an on-going basis by the intense solar wind produced by the two large and very bright stars.

(The spokes are just artifacts of the Webb camera system)

So looking at the 17 concentric rings represents about 140 years of interactions between the stars.