JWST captured a stunning image of a star about to go supernova
A bright, hot star known as Wolf-Rayet 124 (WR 124).
Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, STSCI, Webb ERO Production Team
About 15,000 light-years away, a star is preparing to go supernova. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has captured a stunning image of a massive star known as a Wolf-Rayet star that began to shed its outer layers before exploding into a supernova.
This star is called WR 124 and is 30 times more massive than the Sun. When massive stars run out of hydrogen and are forced to burn inside, they begin to fuse heavier elements instead. This fusion produces powerful bursts of energy, blasting winds at speeds of millions of kilometers per hour.
The powerful winds blow away the star’s outer core, resulting in a large dust and gas plume, as shown in this JWST image. Researchers calculated that WR 124 lost about 10 times the mass of the Sun.
After the star runs out of heavy matter it can fuse with, it explodes. The lifetime of a Wolf-Rayet giant star is relatively short, a few million years at most, before the star explodes.
Although the dust the star produces at that time may be cosmically significant. The details in JWST’s observations should help astronomers figure out how this dust is formed and whether the dust grains are large enough to survive a looming supernova.
This is important not only because of the role that dust plays in the evolution of the universe, creating the environment for spaceships to grow, but also because researchers think there is more dust than our best theories for dust formation explain. Determining how dust behaves around Wolf-Rayet stars like WR 124 can help us figure out where all that extra dust is coming from.
Topics:
- The stars/
- James Webb Space Telescope
