The Serpent Eating Its Own Tail: Dust Destruction in the Apep Colliding-Wind Nebula
Ryan M. T. White, Benjamin J. S. Pope, Peter G. Tuthill, Yinuo Han, Shashank Dholakia, Ryan M. Lau, Joseph R. Callingham, Noel D. Richardson

TL;DR
This study reveals how dust in the Apep colliding-wind nebula is shaped by stellar interactions, confirming the system's hierarchical triple nature and providing new constraints on its orbital and wind parameters.
Contribution
First direct observation of a star carving a cavity in a colliding-wind nebula, establishing the O star as part of the Apep system, and constraining the system's orbital characteristics.
Findings
The O star is physically associated with Apep.
The binary has an orbital period over 190 years.
A new geometric model constrains wind and orbital parameters.
Abstract
Much of the carbonaceous dust observed in the early universe may originate from colliding wind binaries (CWBs) hosting hot, luminous Wolf-Rayet (WR) stars. Downstream of the shock between the stellar winds there exists a suitable environment for dust grain formation, and the orbital motion of the stars wraps this dust into richly structured spiral geometries. The Apep system is the most extreme WR-CWB in our Milky Way: two WR stars produce a complex spiral dust nebula, whose slow expansion has been linked to a gamma-ray burst progenitor. It has been unclear whether the O-type supergiant 0.7" distant from the WR+WR binary is physically associated with the system, and whether it affects the dusty nebula. Multi-epoch VLT/VISIR and JWST/MIRI observations show that this northern companion star routinely carves a cavity in the dust nebula - the first time such an effect has been observed in a…
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