Revisiting and Resolving Carbon-rich Wolf-Rayet Dust Factories with JWST

For decades, a subset of carbon-rich WR (WC) stars have been known to actively form dust despite their extreme environments. Although these systems can produce copious amounts of dust, they have been commonly overlooked as significant sources of dust in the ISM of galaxies in the local and early Universe due to the persisting mysteries on their dust formation and the influence of binary companions. In this talk, I will highlight our major results that combine a dust SED analysis of Galactic dust-forming WC stars with Binary Population and Spectral Synthesis (BPASS) models and show that WC binaries can be early and significant sources of dust at LMC-like and solar metallicities in constant star-forming environments. I will also discuss the results our research program that combines archival and new infrared (IR) imaging observations to investigate the properties of dusty WC outflows. Our future plans for studying dusty WC outflows notably include approved Early Release Science observations with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in Cycle 1.