Since the summer of 2022, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has been hovering in space 1.6 million kilometers above Earth.
From there, NASA’s telescope captured thousands of stunning images of objects 13.5 billion light-years away.
He has now immortalized a dazzling image of a star about to explode in a stunning, luminous cloud of cosmic dust.
30 times larger
The giant star is named WR 124 and is 30 times the size of our Sun. It is located 15,000 light-years from Earth, in the constellation Sagitta.
according to NASA The image shows a star that is about to go supernova. will according to Large Norwegian Encyclopedia Says a giant starburst caused by the rapid collapse of the star’s core.
Slow death: In 2015, the Hubble Space Telescope captured this image of WR 124 inside the ejected gas cloud. Photo: AFP/NTB
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What makes the image unique is that it shows the star as its outer layers are shedding. So far, it has ejected more than a dozen solar masses, including one solar mass equal to the mass of our sun.
According to NASA, this type of star is rarely called Wolf-Rayet stars.
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Star life cycle
In short, a Wolf-Rayet star is a star with an extremely hot surface. The temperature in this type of star can range from 25,000 to 50,000 degrees Celsius.
The JWST telescope took the first image of WR 124 shortly after its commissioning in 2022.
It has the ability to detect the infrared glow of gas as it cools to form cosmic dust. This enables us to see how the dying star’s luminous halo is captured in beautiful detail.
Massive stars race through their life cycles, and only some go through a short Wolf-Rayet phase before turning supernova, NASA wrote in connection with the publication of the images.
This makes Webb’s detailed observations of this rare phase valuable to astronomers, the space scientists explained.
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Excess dust
Interplanetary dust is common throughout the solar system, including here on Earth.
according to forcing It is estimated that about 4,700 tons of space dust – also called micrometeorites – strike our planet annually.
– You are no more than a few meters away from a cosmic dust particle. They are all around us. On the street, at home, even on clothes. But they are very difficult to find, says micrometeorite researcher Matthew Jung of Imperial College London in an interview with Forskning.no.
NASA reports that the universe contains more dust than astronomers can account for.
Astronomers believe that JWST observations like those of WR 124 can shed light on the mysterious origin of all that dust.
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