ALBERTA

Smith fails to back up Indigenous heritage claims after report finds no proof

02:23
RAW: Chiefs respond to Smith's heritage claims

Sean Amato
CTV News Edmonton
Updated Nov. 18, 2022 

There was an eruption of laughter amongst First Nations people Friday at an Edmonton hotel when a panel of Chiefs was asked about Alberta's premier claiming to have Indigenous heritage.

Danielle Smith has spoken publicly about her Cherokee roots as far back as 2012, and in September she wrote in a tweet that she is "someone with indigenous (sic) ancestry."

But an investigative report published by the Aboriginal People's Television Network (APTN) this week found no records to back her claims, and Smith refused to provide any evidence, or even restate her claims, Friday.

"Premier Smith has heard about her heritage from her loved ones. Her family has spoken for years about their ancestry and she is proud of her family history. The Premier hasn’t done a deep dive into her ancestry but is proud of her roots," her spokesperson wrote.

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CTV News Edmonton asked several Chiefs about the situation at a joint press conference hosted by Treaty 6, 7 and 8 where leaders gathered to speak out against Smith's plans for a sovereignty act.

"I think (she) should go to the pink palace here, the Canada office," Treaty 8 Grand Chief Arthur Noskey said with a chuckle.

Edmonton's Canada Place building houses an office of Indigenous Services Canada.

"They're the ones that have that category of which bloodline you are and maybe she can find herself there. Maybe then we'll believe."

Smith's September claim came after a contractor on her United Conservative Party leadership campaign team was fired for "offensive and entirely unacceptable" recordings of him mocking Indigenous people.

my campaign to immediately terminate any contract or other dealings with the involved company.

As someone with indigenous ancestry, I honour the heritage of Canada’s Indigenous Peoples as one of our nation’s and province’s greatest treasures and strengths. /2— Danielle Smith (@ABDanielleSmith) September 28, 2022

"As someone with indigenous (sic) ancestry, I honour the heritage of Canada’s Indigenous Peoples as one of our nation’s and province’s greatest treasures and strengths," Smith wrote.

Chief Tony Alexis, from the Alexis Nakota Sioux Nation west of Edmonton, spoke about how people falsely claiming Indigenous heritage has become a problem.

"What we're realizing is that anybody wants to be a part of that Indigenous community if there's a benefit," Alexis said.

"At the university level we have people who are not Indigenous who claim that they are Indigenous to gain benefits to gain bursaries. There's always something behind it."

Chiefs from Treaty 6, 7 and 8 speak to journalists in west Edmonton on November 18, 2022 (Sean Amato/CTV News Edmonton.)

Chief Alexis and others are calling on Smith to stop the sovereignty act and consult with Indigenous people. He suggested the legislation is further proof that the premier's claims are bogus.

"A true Indigenous person would not go against all the Treaty people of this land," he said.

NDP MLA Richard Feehan was at that press conference and said Alexis' words meant far more than his on the topic of Smith's Indigenous claim.

"I think she needs to have a conversation with the First Nations about this," Feehan told reporters.

"Not with people like me or the Opposition. The First Nations chiefs, who are representatives of the people, need to hear from her and she has clearly failed to do that in every possible way."

A spokesperson for Smith said she was not available Friday to take questions from journalists.

Danielle Smith's heritage brought into question

 

First Nations chief critical of Alberta Premier Danielle Smith's Indigenous heritage claim

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Smith hasn't done a deep dive into her ancestry but is proud of her roots, premier's office says

Angela Amato · The Canadian Press · Posted: Nov 18, 2022 

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith speaks at the United Conservative Party annual general meeting in Edmonton last month. The Alberta premier has claimed Cherokee ancestry. (Amber Bracken/The Canadian Press)

A First Nations leader in Alberta is questioning Premier Danielle Smith's claim of Indigenous heritage.

Smith has said she has some Cherokee roots and years ago declared herself as a person of mixed race.

Chief Tony Alexis of Alexis Nakota Sioux Nation, west of Edmonton, said on Friday that a true Indigenous person would not go against treaty people.

He made the comment at a news conference where leaders of Treaties 6, 7, and 8 said they oppose Smith's plan to introduce an Alberta sovereignty act that would allow her government to opt out of federal measures deemed harmful to provincial interests.

When the leaders were asked about Smith's ancestry claim, many in the room erupted with laughter.

"A true Indigenous person would not go against all the treaty people of this land," said Alexis.

"What we're realizing is that anybody wants to be a part of the Indigenous community if there's a benefit."

• Treaty chiefs oppose proposed sovereignty act, say it infringes on rights

A story this week by the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network looked into Smith's family tree and found no evidence of the premier being Indigenous. APTN worked with Canadian and Cherokee genealogists and examined U.S. census reports from the late 1800s in it's investigation.

CBC has not independently verified APTN's reporting.

The premier's office issued a statement following the story stating, "Smith hasn't done a deep dive into her ancestry but is proud of her roots."

"Like so many Albertans that have origins from all over the world, Premier Smith has heard about her heritage from her loved ones. Her family has spoken for years about their ancestry and she is proud of her family history."

Chief Tony Alexis from Alexis Nakota Sioux Nation speaks at Lac Ste. Anne in July. Alexis said Friday that a true Indigenous person would not go against treaty people. (Trevor Wilson/CBC)

APTN said Smith claimed to be a person of "mixed-race ancestry" in 2012, when she was leader of the Wildrose Party.

In the legislature that year, APTN said Smith spoke about her great-great-grandmother.

"She was a member of the Cherokee Nation that had been forcibly relocated to Kansas from the southeastern United States in the 1830s by the U.S. government, a terrible stain on the history of America known as the Trail of Tears," Smith said, according to legislative records obtained by APTN.

More recently, Smith declared Indigenous lineage during the United Conservative Party leadership race.

"As someone with Indigenous ancestry, I honour the heritage of Canada's Indigenous Peoples as one of our nation's and province's greatest treasures and strengths," said the tweet from Smith on Sept. 28.

Some false claims of Indigenous ancestry have recently come to light at universities in Canada.

Alexis said there's always a reason for Indigenous identity fraud.

"At the university level, we have people who are not Indigenous who claim that they are Indigenous to gain benefits, to gain bursaries and so on," said the chief.

"There's always something behind it."

---

This story was produced with the financial assistance of the Meta-Canadian Press News Fellowship, which is not involved in the editorial process.

WOODY GUTHRIE ONCE SAID THAT AN OKLAHOMAN IS ONE THIRD WHITE, ONE THIRD BLACK AND ONE THIRD CHEROKEE

GUESS SMITH IS AN OAKIE

National Gallery of Canada lays off chief and Indigenous art curators

November 18, 2022
By Harry Miller


Photographic banners by artist Genevieve Cadieux hang outside the National Gallery of Canada on July 16, 2021.Ashley Fraser/Globe and Mail

The National Gallery of Canada has laid off four senior staff members including Greg A. Hill, its curator of Indigenous art, and chief curator Kitty Scott.

The gallery has experienced a period of uncertainty in the wake of the departure of director Sasha Suda in July. She left only a year after unveiling a strategic plan that placed Indigenous knowledge at the core of the gallery’s mission.

The gallery is currently seeking a new director.

Mr. Hill said he was let go because he disagreed with how the gallery was approaching the new decolonization agenda.

“I want to put this out before it is spun into meaningless platitudes,” Mr. Hill wrote in a post on Instagram Thursday. “The truth is, I’m being fired because I don’t agree with and am deeply disturbed by the colonial and anti-Indigenous ways the Department of Indigenous Ways and Decolonization is being run.”

Mr. Hill did not immediately respond to requests for further comment.

Liliane Lê, the gallery’s vice-president of public affairs, declined to comment on the layoffs.

In an internal memo to staff obtained by The Globe and Mail, interim director Angela Cassie writes: “The work-force changes are the result of numerous factors and were made to better align the gallery’s leadership team with the organization’s new strategic plan. … For privacy reasons, the gallery is not at liberty to discuss details of these departures.”

Mr. Hill, the inaugural Audain senior curator of Indigenous art, had worked at the gallery for 22 years. He is a specialist in Iroquoian languages and culture, and in global contemporary Indigenous art.

“It was, of course, a great surprise,” said Vancouver art collector and philanthropist Michael Audain, who had endowed the Indigenous curatorial job since 2007. “I was under the impression that Greg had done a creditable job of introducing Indigenous art into the gallery, something which was sadly missing when former director Pierre Théberge originally asked me to endow Greg’s position,” he said in an e-mail.

Mr. Audain added that the gallery has sent him a proposal to reorient the endowment, but he has yet to review it.

The gallery has also laid off Ms. Scott, its chief curator and a highly respected advocate for Canadian contemporary art, who previously worked at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. She worked at the National Gallery in the 2000s – when she made the acquisition of Maman, the giant Louise Bourgeois spider sculpture that sits outside the building – and was brought back to Ottawa by Ms. Suda in 2020.

The other two people to lose their jobs are Stephen Gritt, a veteran staffer and director of conservation and technical research, and Denise Siele, a recent hire as senior communications manager. (The former staffers could not be reached for comment Friday.)

Ms. Cassie, formerly the gallery’s chief strategy and inclusion officer, has served as interim director since Ms. Suda left for a prestigious job as director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art only three years into a five-year term. Ms. Cassie had previously worked at the Canadian Museum of Human Rights in Winnipeg before joining the gallery last year.

A passionate advocate for modernizing art museums, Ms. Suda had brought in the strategic plan, with its emphasis on “interconnection through time and space” and a new motto, ankosé, an Anishinaabemowin word that translates as “everything is connected.”

However, during her tenure, there was also a high turnover of senior staff.

Crack in Earth's magnetic field triggers extremely rare pink auroras witnessed in Norway

Camille Fine

USA TODAY

Want to know what the night sky looks like after a solar storm smashes into earth and rips a hole into the planet’s magnetic field? 

The combination of cosmic events led to a rare explosion of strikingly vivid pink auroras the filled Norway's night sky. The unusual colored light show lasted for around two minutes and was caused by a crack in Earth's magnetic field, enabling highly energetic solar particles, known as solar wind, to enter into the atmosphere on Nov. 3, according to Spaceweather.com. 

Greenlander tour company guide Markus Varik spotted the auroras at around 6 p.m. while leading a tour group near Tromsø, Norway, Varik told USA TODAY.  Although the pink auroras weren’t the best he’s ever witnessed before, the color's intensity was “super rare” and “almost never happens,” Varik said.   

Varik said he has conducted over 1,000 tours of Norway’s auroras as a guide for over 10 years, but these were the strongest hues of pink and purple he’s witnessed in his entire life. 

Canadian Pacific Holiday train returns:CP holiday train set to return to eight US states for first time since 2019

Varik said that auroras are usually green, the color of oxygen atoms being struck by energetic particles, but purple shades can occur under “rare” conditions when electrons penetrate deep into the atmosphere and collide with molecules of nitrogen. 

“The Northern Lights are always different, never the same. It’s like us, people, completely unique in our own special ways,” Varik said. “When the auoras give us a blessing to be able to experience this kind of phenomena, it always goes very spiritual to me.”

Auroras, usually between 62 and 186 miles above Earth's surface, are formed when streams of solar wind pass around the planet's magnetic field and superheat gases, which then glow in the night sky. 

Auroras are more common at the North and South Poles, areas with weaker shields for cosmic radiation, according to NASA. 

Camille Fine is a trending visual producer on USA TODAY's NOW team. 

300 Years of Research: Princeton Scientists Solve a Bacterial Mystery

By PRINCETON UNIVERSITY, ENGINEERING SCHOOL NOVEMBER 18, 2022

The researchers were able to observe bacterial colonies’ clumpy growth in three dimensions. Credit: Neil Adelantar/Princeton University

Researchers found that bacteria colonies form in three dimensions in rough shapes similar to crystals.

Bacterial colonies often grow in streaks on Petri dishes in laboratories, but no one has understood how the colonies arrange themselves in more realistic three-dimensional (3-D) environments, such as tissues and gels in human bodies or soils and sediments in the environment, until now. This knowledge could be important for advancing environmental and medical research.

A Princeton University team has now developed a method for observing bacteria in 3-D environments. They discovered that when the bacteria grow, their colonies consistently form fascinating rough shapes that resemble a branching head of broccoli, far more complex than what is seen in a Petri dish. 

“Ever since bacteria were discovered over 300 years ago, most lab research has studied them in test tubes or on Petri dishes,” said Sujit Datta, an assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering at Princeton and the study’s senior author. This was a result of practical limits rather than a lack of curiosity. “If you try to watch bacteria grow in tissues or in soils, those are opaque, and you can’t actually see what the colony is doing. That has really been the challenge.”

Researchers Sujit Datta, assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering, Alejandro Martinez-Calvo, a postdoctoral researcher, and Anna Hancock, a graduate student in chemical and biological engineering. Credit: David Kelly Crow for Princeton University

Datta’s research group discovered this behavior using a ground-breaking experimental setup that enables them to make previously unheard-of observations of bacterial colonies in their natural, three-dimensional state. Unexpectedly, the scientists discovered that the growth of the wild colonies consistently resembles other natural phenomena like the growth of crystals or the spread of frost on a windowpane.

“These kinds of rough, branchy shapes are ubiquitous in nature, but typically in the context of growing or agglomerating non-living systems,” said Datta. “What we found is that growing in 3-D, bacterial colonies exhibit a very similar process despite the fact that these are collectives of living organisms.”

This new explanation of how bacteria colonies develop in three dimensions was recently published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  Datta and his colleagues hope that their discoveries will help with a wide range of bacterial growth research, from the creation of more effective antimicrobials to pharmaceutical, medical, and environmental research, as well as procedures that harness bacteria for industrial use.

Princeton researchers in the lab. Credit: David Kelly Crow for Princeton University

“At a fundamental level, we’re excited that this work reveals surprising connections between the development of form and function in biological systems and studies of inanimate growth processes in materials science and statistical physics. But also, we think that this new view of when and where cells are growing in 3D will be of interest to anyone interested in bacterial growth, such as in environmental, industrial, and biomedical applications,” Datta said.

For several years, Datta’s research team has been developing a system that allows them to analyze phenomena that are usually cloaked in opaque settings, such as fluid flowing through soils. The team uses specially designed hydrogels, which are water-absorbent polymers similar to those in jello and contact lenses, as matrices to support bacterial growth in 3-D. Unlike those common versions of hydrogels, Datta’s materials are made up of extremely tiny balls of hydrogel that are easily deformed by the bacteria, allow for the free passage of oxygen and nutrients that support bacterial growth, and are transparent to light.

“It’s like a ball pit where each ball is an individual hydrogel. They’re microscopic, so you can’t really see them,” Datta said. The research team calibrated the hydrogel’s makeup to mimic the structure of soil or tissue. The hydrogel is strong enough to support the growing bacterial colony without presenting enough resistance to constrain the growth.

“As the bacterial colonies grow in the hydrogel matrix, they can easily rearrange the balls around them so they are not trapped,” he said. “It’s like plunging your arm into the ball pit. If you drag it through, the balls rearrange themselves around your arm.”

The researchers performed experiments with four different species of bacteria (including one that helps to generate kombucha’s tart taste) to see how they grew in three dimensions.

“We changed cell types, nutrient conditions, hydrogel properties,” Datta said. The researchers saw the same, rough-edged growth patterns in each case. “We systematically changed all those parameters, but this appears to be a generic phenomenon.”

Datta said two factors seemed to cause the broccoli-shaped growth on a colony’s surface. First, bacteria with access to high levels of nutrients or oxygen will grow and reproduce faster than ones in a less abundant environment. Even the most uniform environments have some uneven density of nutrients, and these variations cause spots in the colony’s surface to surge ahead or fall behind. Repeated in three dimensions, this causes the bacteria colony to form bumps and nodules as some subgroups of bacteria grow more quickly than their neighbors.

Second, the researchers observed that in three-dimensional growth, only the bacteria close to the colony’s surface grew and divided. The bacteria crammed into the center of the colony seemed to lapse into a dormant state. Because the bacteria on the inside were not growing and dividing, the outer surface was not subjected to pressure that would cause it to expand evenly. Instead, its expansion is primarily driven by growth along the very edge of the colony. And the growth along the edge is subject to nutrient variations that eventually results in bumpy, uneven growth.

“If the growth was uniform, and there was no difference between the bacteria inside the colony and those on the periphery, it would be like filling a balloon, said Alejandro Martinez-Calvo, a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton and the paper’s first author. “The pressure from the inside would fill in any perturbations on the periphery.”

To explain why this pressure was not present, the researchers added a fluorescent tag to proteins that become active in cells when the bacteria grow. The fluorescent protein lights up when bacteria are active and remains dark when they are not. Observing the colonies, the researchers saw that bacteria on the colony’s edge were bright green, while the core remained dark.

“The colony essentially self-organizes into a core and a shell that behave in very different ways,” Datta said.

Datta said the theory is that the bacteria on the colony’s edges scoop up most of the nutrients and oxygen, leaving little for the inside bacteria.

“We think they are going dormant because they are starved,” Datta said, although he cautioned that further research was needed to explore this.

Datta said the experiments and mathematical models used by the researchers found that there was an upper limit to the bumps that formed on the colony surfaces. The bumpy surface is a result of random variations in the oxygen and nutrients in the environment, but the randomness tends to even out within certain limits.

“The roughness has an upper limit of how large it can grow – the floret size if we are comparing it to broccoli,” he said. “We were able to predict that from the math, and it seems to be an inevitable feature of large colonies growing in 3D.”

Because the bacterial growth tended to follow a similar pattern as crystal growth and other well-studied phenomena of inanimate materials, Datta said the researchers were able to adapt standard mathematical models to reflect the bacterial growth. He said future research will likely focus on better understanding the mechanisms behind the growth, the implications of rough growth shapes for colony functioning, and applying these lessons to other areas of interest.

“Ultimately, this work gives us more tools to understand, and eventually control, how bacteria grow in nature,” he said.

Reference: “Morphological instability and roughening of growing 3D bacterial colonies” by Alejandro Martínez-Calvo, Tapomoy Bhattacharjee, R. Kōnane Bay, Hao Nghi Luu, Anna M. Hancock, Ned S. Wingreen and Sujit S. Datta, 18 October 2022, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2208019119

The study was funded by the National Science Foundation, the New Jersey Health Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, The Eric and Wendy Schmidt Transformative Technology Fund, the Pew Biomedical Scholars Fund, and the Human Frontier Science Program.

Baffling “Spiderweb” Star Discovered – Is It an Alien Megastructure?

By UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY NOVEMBER 18, 2022

JWST image vs model of WR140. Credit: Left image: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI/JPL-Caltech. Right image: Yinuo Han/Peter Tuthill/Ryan Lau

A puzzling image captured by the James Webb Telescope explained. 

A strange image of the distant star WR140 surrounded by concentric geometric ripples captured by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in July has perplexed astronomers around the world, even sparking frenzied internet speculation that it could be evidence of an alien megastructure light-years across.

The perplexing picture was captured soon after JWST began scientific operations and published its first full batch of images. It rapidly sparked a heated debate on the internet, with some speculating that the enormous ripples were caused by aliens. The picture was described as “bonkers” by Mark McCaughrean, a senior adviser for science and exploration at the European Space Agency and a member of the James Webb Space Telescope Science Working Group.

WR140 JWST image of concentric dust rings emanating from the WR140 binary. Credit: NASA-ESA-CSA-STScI-JPL-Caltech

However, two Australian astronomers explain in two companion papers recently published in Nature and Nature Astronomy that the 17 concentric rings seen circling the star are actually a series of mammoth dust shells created by the cyclic interaction of a pair of hot stars, one of which is a dying Wolf-Rayet, locked together in a tight orbit.

“Like clockwork, WR140 puffs out a sculpted smoke ring every eight years, which is then inflated in the stellar wind like a balloon,” said Professor Peter Tuthill from the Sydney Institute for Astronomy at the University of Sydney, a co-author in both papers. “Eight years later, as the binary returns in its orbit, another ring appears, the same as the one before, streaming out into space inside the bubble of the previous one, like a set of giant nested Russian dolls.”

3D model of WR140 shells after 18 orbits (or 144 years) of cyclic dust formation. Credit: Yinuo Han/Peter Tuthill/Ryan Lau

The WR140 pair is made up of a huge Wolf-Rayet star and an even more massive blue supergiant star that are gravitationally bound in an eight-year orbit. While all stars produce stellar winds, those produced by Wolf-Rayet stars are more akin to a stellar hurricane. Elements in the wind, such as carbon, condense as soot, which stays hot enough to glow brightly in the infrared. The dust clouds, like smoke caught by the wind, provide something for telescopes to watch as they follow the flow.

Because the two stars are in elliptical rather than circular orbits, dust production turns on and off as WR140’s binary companion nears and then departs the point of closest approach. Based on data collected with other telescopes since 2006, Professor Tuthill and his former student Yinuo Han – now at the University of Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy – created a three-dimensional model of the dust plume’s geometry.

Near-infrared imagery of WR140’s expanding circumstellar dust structure. Credit: Yinuo Han & Peter Tuthill

That model, created for the Nature paper of which Han is the lead author, turned out to perfectly explain the bizarre results obtained by the JWST in July. Thanks to this and other contributions, both Han and Professor Tuthill also became co-authors of the Nature Astronomy paper with the new Webb data.

What’s more, in their Nature paper, Han and Professor Tuthill showed – for the first time – direct evidence of intense starlight driving into matter and accelerating it, after tracking titanic plumes of dust generated by the violent interactions between two colossal stars over 16 years.

Illustration of the WR140 binary star system. Credit: Amanda Smith/IoA/University of Cambridge

It’s known that starlight carries momentum, exerting a push on matter known as ‘radiation pressure’. Astronomers often see the aftermath of this in the form of matter coasting at high speed around the cosmos, but have never caught the process in the act. Direct observation of acceleration due to forces other than gravity is rarely witnessed, and never in a stellar environment like this

“It’s hard to see starlight causing acceleration because the force fades with distance, and other forces quickly take over,” said Han. “To witness acceleration at the level that it becomes measurable, the material needs to be reasonably close to the star or the source of the radiation pressure needs to be extra strong. WR140 is a binary star whose ferocious radiation field supercharges these effects, placing them within reach of our high-precision data.”

The relative size of the Wolf-Rayet star, its O-type blue supergiant, and the Sun, at top left. Credit: JPL-Caltech

Using imaging technology known as interferometry, which was able to act like a zoom lens for the 10-meter mirror of the Keck telescope in Hawaii, the Australians were able to recover sufficiently sharp images of WR140 for the study.

They discovered that the dust does not stream out from the star with the wind forming a hazy ball, as had been thought. Instead, the dust condenses adjacent to where the winds from the two stars collide, on the surface of a cone-shaped shock front between them. Because the orbiting binary star is in constant motion, the shock front also rotates. The sooty plume gets wrapped into a spiral, in the same way that droplets form a spiral in a garden sprinkler.

Raw and processed 3D model of WR140 shells after 18 orbits (or 144 years) of cyclic dust formation. Credit: Yinuo Han/Peter Tuthill/Ryan Lau

“In the absence of external forces, each dust spiral should expand at a constant speed,” said Han. “We were puzzled at first because we could not get our model to fit the observations until we finally realized that we were seeing something new. The data did not fit because the expansion speed wasn’t constant, but rather that it was accelerating. We’d caught that for the first time on camera.”

Once they added the acceleration of dust by starlight into their three-dimensional model of the WR140 binary, it explained their observational data perfectly. And also ended up explaining the strange concentric rings later spotted with JWST.

This animation looks down from above the orbital plane to depict the spiraling creation of dust in the binary star system WR 140. A Wolf-Rayet star—the dense core of an aging massive star—and an O-type star orbit one another, their stellar winds colliding as they get close. The intermixed stellar material blows back past the O star, forming dust as it cools. Credit: NASA, ESA, and J. Olmsted (STScI

“In one sense, we always knew this must be the reason for the outflow, but I never dreamed we’d be able to see the physics at work like this,” said Professor Tuthill. “When I look at the data now, I see WR140’s plume unfurling a like giant sail made of dust. When it catches the photon wind streaming from the star, like a yacht catching a gust, it makes a sudden leap forward.”

With JWST now in operation, researchers will be able to learn much more about WR140 and similar systems. “The Webb telescope offers new extremes of stability and sensitivity,” said Dr Ryan Lau, Assistant Astronomer at the U.S. National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory and lead author of the JWST study published in Nature Astronomy. “We’ll now be able to make observations like this much more easily than from the ground, opening a new window into the world of Wolf-Rayet physics.”

Reference: “Radiation-driven acceleration in the expanding WR140 dust shell” by Yinuo Han, Peter G. Tuthill, Ryan M. Lau, and Anthony Soulain, 12 October 2022, Nature.
DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-05155-5

Reference: “Nested dust shells around the Wolf–Rayet binary WR 140 observed with JWST” by Ryan M. Lau, Matthew J. Hankins, Yinuo Han, Ioannis Argyriou, Michael F. Corcoran, Jan J. Eldridge, Izumi Endo, Ori D. Fox, Macarena Garcia Marin, Theodore R. Gull, Olivia C. Jones, Kenji Hamaguchi, Astrid Lamberts, David R. Law, Thomas Madura, Sergey V. Marchenko, Hideo Matsuhara, Anthony F. J. Moffat, Mark R. Morris, Patrick W. Morris, Takashi Onaka, Michael E. Ressler, Noel D. Richardson, Christopher M. P. Russell, Joel Sanchez-Bermudez, Nathan Smith, Anthony Soulain, Ian R. Stevens, Peter Tuthill, Gerd Weigelt, Peredur M. Williams, and Ryodai Yamaguchi, 12 October 2022, Nature Astronomy.
DOI: 10.1038/s41550-022-01812-x