JWST captures stunning image of a star about to go supernova

At a distance of about 15,000 light years, the star is preparing to go supernova. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has captured a beautiful image of a massive star known as a Wolf-Rayet star that has begun shedding its outer layers before going supernova.

This star is called WR 124 and is about 30 times as massive as the Sun. When the core of such huge stars runs out of hydrogen, they instead begin to synthesize heavier elements. This merger creates powerful bursts of energy, throwing out gusts of wind at millions of kilometers per hour.

Powerful winds rip off the star’s outer layers, resulting in a huge cloud of dust and gas similar to the one seen in this JWST image. The researchers calculated that WR 124 has already lost about 10 times the mass of the Sun.

As soon as the star runs out of heavy elements, it will explode. The Wolf-Rayet phase of a massive star’s life is relatively short, a few million years at most, before the star explodes.

However, the dust that the star is producing at this time may be of cosmic significance. The details of the JWST observations should help astronomers figure out exactly how this dust behaves and whether the dust grains are large and numerous enough to survive an impending supernova.

This is important not only because of the role that dust plays in the evolution of the universe, shaping the environment in which cosmic building blocks grow, but also because researchers believe there is much more dust in the universe than our best theories of dust formation can explain. . Determining how dust behaves around Wolf-Rayet stars like WR 124 can help us understand where all that extra dust is coming from.