Coiled shells sent out by two stars known as Apep, after the Egyptian god of chaos, have come into clear view: NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has shown spirals of dust that trace 700 years of activity.

“Webb has observed similar systems, but this shows by far the most detail,” said Yinuo Han, a lead author on a new paper and postdoctoral researcher at Caltech in Pasadena, California. “It's rare enough to see one Wolf-Rayet star, but in Apep there are two. When their stellar winds collide, they produce large amounts of carbonaceous dust over 25 years during each orbit.”

By combining these new mid-infrared observations with a series of images from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), Han and his collaborators narrowed down how often the stars sail past one another — once every 190 years — and confirmed that a third star, a massive supergiant, is “slicing” holes into the dusty shells.