Revisiting and Resolving Carbon-rich Wolf-Rayet Dust Factories

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 discuss the results and plans from our research program that combines archival data thermal IR observations, new imaging and spectroscopic data from Subaru/COMICS, and approved Early Release Science observations with JWST in Cycle 1. I will highlight our major results that uniquely combine a comprehensive dust SED analysis of Galactic dust-forming WC stars with Binary Population and Spectral Synthesis (BPASS) models and show that WC binaries are early sources and significant sources of dust at LMC-like and solar metallicities in constant star-forming environments.