Noel Richardson

The image shows a false-colour image of the Apep colliding wind nebula as taken by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in the mid-infrared. In the centre of the image, there is an orange-coloured spiral coil of dust, not dissimilar in shape from a snail's shell. There are two concentric repeats of the coil that are larger and encompass the inner shell, and these further out shells of dust are coloured red and get dimmer as they get further from the centre of the image. These far out coils of dust look somewhat like translucent spheres. At the very centre of the image is a small spikey object which are the three stars in Apep that create and hide behind the dust shells. There are stars scattered throughout the image, each with a snowflake-like 'point spread function' that spreads the central brightness of the stars into diffraction spikes. Image credit: Shashank Dholakia for R M T White et al 2025. 'The Serpent Eating Its Own Tail: Dust Destruction in the Apep Colliding-Wind Nebula'. PI: Yinuo Han.

Exciting news! My second first-author paper is out on the arXiv today!! arxiv.org/abs/2507.14610

We present a brand new JWST image of the Apep colliding wind binary in the mid-infrared, and we study what this nebula can tell us about the THREE stars in it's centre. Read on for more... 1/?🔭🧪

A bright, white star sits right of center. Concentric white rings surround the white star, but are mainly only visible from the 10 o'clock and 5 o'clock positions. The rings appear at mid inclination rather than face on. There are pale clouds around the star, some of which look like skinny comets (they are not comets) with trailing tails, brightest parts toward the star. There are many other stars in the image, but they are dim compared to the very bright subject of the image. Rays known as diffraction spikes surround the star in geometric precision. They are distracting artifacts, but it easy enough to look past them. There are some muddy brown at the top and left of the image and a dark blue to the bottom left. The colors do not necessarily have much bearing on the image as the rings are the important part.

WR 48A from JWST. You know you need some weird in your day.

From GO 4093: Fingerprinting the history of episodic dust creation in Wolf-Rayet binaries, Principal Investigator Noel Richardson

flic.kr/p/2riubcR

A nebula with a bright star at its center. The nebula has three distinct layers, and the pattern in the layers repeats in a way that implies there are more layers outside the image boundaries, though they would be faint. The shape of the nebula is something like nesting yin yangs, with the center smallest one bright and dense, shining, smooth and golden. The middle one is orange and textured like a sherpa blanket. The largest, outer shell is fainter, and red like an ember. Its texture has softened along with its dissipation into space. There are some small stars speckled around the image, and one annoyingly bright, spiky one that's got too many colors because of the way the light spreads from point sources through the telescope's optics. A pale haze of grayish cloud also covers the scene, but it is sheer and translucent.

Apep. JWST. It's weird. Just look at it.

From GO 5842: What lies beyond the inner spiral of Apep?
Principal Investigator: Yinuo Han

flic.kr/p/2riELBn

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Not the most important part of this post by a long shot, BUT...

YAY for massive binary stars and dusty spirals in space! 💫🌀 So excited to be on this paper with @astro-noel.bsky.social and my awesome grad student Emma Lieb.

(And do please sign to #SaveNASA, which funds this super cool research!)

Between family visiting us and a short vacation to Southern California, I think I’ve driven too much lately. So as I decided how to get to Tucson for the Cottrell conference, I booked a shuttle to Tucson, stopping in PHX.

As I see monsoon clouds towards Tucson, I am very happy with this decision.

Embry-Riddle Professor, Undergrads Unlock Secrets of Cosmic Dust With the Webb Telescope

Embry‑Riddle Aeronautical University: Astronomers Unlock Secrets of Cosmic Dust With JWST news.erau.edu/headlines/em...

Nobel Prize Laureate Kip Thorne speaking yesterday at the Albert Einstein Institute in Postdam, Germany:
"Donald Trump is destroying America's capacity for [leading science]. We are counting on Europe to take over here and elsewhere." ⚛️ 🧪

US science is being wrecked, and its leadership is fighting the last war Facing an extreme budget, the National Academies hosted an event that ignored it.

The failure of the National Academy of Sciences USA to make a clear and unequivocal statement about the disastrous Trump administration science policies — it lets all of us down and dooms them to eventual irrelevance.

I have two additional projects that my students are already working on, so more to come in the future.

Proplyds around WR 48a. Almost every little object has a "tail" that points away from the WR binary

And one surprising thing, around WR 48a, which is in a cluster of stars, we not only find the dust shells - we find dusty clumps or young stars that look like the Orion proplyds.

This allowed us to measure how old the oldest detected dust was based on knowing the orbital periods of the systems. The dust was up to hundreds of years old!

21 um image of WR48a (left) and flux profiles on the right

Immediately, we were able see a large dust structure around each binary. We also managed to measure radial profiles in some directions allowing us to see how many shells we detect:

Dusty rings around four carbon-rich WR binaries from JWST/MIRI. Top left: WR48a, top right: WR112, bottom left: WR 125, and bottom right: WR 137 blue = 7.7 um green = 15 um red = 21 um

After we found the dust survived in this harsh environment, I led a team to ask the question: Is it long-lived for all of the harsh environments? So, we proposed for JWST observations in Cycle 2, and finally had observations taken last summer. Here are the four systems we observed

JWST Image of 17 dust shells around the Wolf-Rayet binary WR140

This paper was the result of a follow-up on the famous WR 140 image from JWST

Carbon-rich dust injected into the interstellar medium by Galactic WC binaries survives for hundreds of years Some carbon-rich Wolf-Rayet stars (WC stars) show an infrared excess from dust emission. Dust forms in the collision of the WC wind with a companion star's wind. As this dust is carried towards the IS...

I am delighted to announce that my paper was accepted to the Astrophysical Journal this morning. Here's the submitted version to arXiv: arxiv.org/abs/2505.11616

This was a fun paper to write. Thanks for putting it up on bsky @astroryan.bsky.social

I submitted mine early (Monday late?) and the number was 6201.

Perhaps one of the more irritating parts of being a faculty member is having to request new software for a computing course. The uni seems to always want these for the upcoming academic year by May, which doesn't allow for much dynamic teaching.

Why do the kids never think 1/(2million) radians is small enough to use a small angle approximation? At that point it isn’t even an approximation 🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️

but to be fair, I had a pretty negative thing at work today. It's amazing how one person and their one comment can really ruffle your feathers. and surprisingly to me, it wasn't even the a**hat in the WH.

My amazing students at the entrance to Lowell Observatory

been a bit since I posted a good thing of the day, because I've been busy and ignoring social media is not a bad thing... so this week my highlight was attending the Flagstaff Astronomy Symposium at Lowell at seeing my students (past and present) give great talks

It would be beautiful if the Democrats steal the news cycle by all just getting up and walking out in the middle

This list is so long and taking up so much real estate in his speech it’s almost like they want to distract from their massive cuts to Medicaid

It's absolutely wild to praise Elon Musk and DOGE who broke the law and didn't have the required security clearance to access the personal information of millions of Americans through at least 15 federal agencies – including the Treasury Department and the IRS.

Apparently I won an award. However, I think winning Textbook Affordability means I don’t get any cash prizes because I didn’t make the bookstore money.

Good afternoon. Elon Musk is... still a nazi.

Every scientist, long before they were a scientist, was a little kid who stood in front of a fish tank or stared up at the stars or turned over a rock to look at the bugs underneath and said “wow”. On the best days, working in science still feels like that.

there's a fantastic topical meeting in Mexico I want to go to in the fall. The getting there and back from where I live is honestly terrifying right now (driving) with *all this* going on... I have ten days to figure out if I am *mentally* able to go.

Any thoughts from astro friends here?

Today, I am celebrating people standing up for democracy and two former students being admitted to grad programs this last week.