Astro asps

VERY LARGE TELESCOPE, 19 NOVEMBER 2018

Astronomers named this star system ‘Apep’ after the snake-like Egyptian god of chaos, because of the serpentine swirls of cosmic material surrounding the stars. The lower object is actually two Wolf-Rayet stars in a binary system. These old, massive stars are ejecting stellar winds of gas into space, creating dust plumes that collide to form the coiling clouds.