by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has just given us some great views of a giant star’s dying days.
On Tuesday (March 14), NASA released JWST images of WR 124, a rare Wolf-Rayet star located about 15,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Sagittarius.
“Massive stars race through their life cycles, and only some of them go through a brief Wolf-Rayet phase before becoming supernova, making Webb’s detailed observations of this rare phase valuable to astronomers,” NASA officials wrote in a description of the images (opens in new tab)which JWST picked up in June 2022 shortly after it went live.
“Wolf-Rayet stars are in the process of shedding their outer layers, resulting in their characteristic halos of gas and dust,” agency officials added.
Related: 12 amazing discoveries of the James Webb Space Telescope
About 30 times more massive than our Sun, WR 124 has ejected more than 10 solar masses of gas and dust into space to date, NASA officials said. All this dust, mundane as it may sound, is extremely interesting to astronomers.
“Dust is an essential part of how the universe works: it protects the formation of stars, gathers to form planets, and serves as a platform for molecules to form and cluster together — including the building blocks of life on Earth ,” NASA officials captioned the image. “Despite the many essential roles dust plays, there is still more dust in the universe than astronomers’ current dust formation theories can explain.”
JWST’s observations could shed light on this mysterious “dust budget surplus,” they added. That’s because cosmic dust is best studied in infrared wavelengths, the kind of light that JWST is optimized to observe.
“Before Webb, dust-loving astronomers simply did not have enough detailed information to investigate questions about dust production in environments like WR 124 and whether the dust grains were large and abundant enough to survive the supernova and make a significant contribution to the overall dust budget,” they wrote NASA officials: “Now these questions can be explored with real data.”
JWST was launched on December 25, 2021 on a European Ariane 5 rocket from French Guiana. The $10 billion observatory then flew toward Earth-Sun Lagrange Point 2, a gravitationally stable point in space about 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) from our planet.
En route to L2, reached in late January 2022, JWST deployed its giant sunshade and multi-segment primary mirror, conducting a complex deployment sequence that left mission team members, scientists and space fans around the world holding their breath.
After a long series of reviews, the mission began its science campaign in June 2022, and NASA released the first JWST images to the public a month later. The telescope is now conducting a wide range of potentially transformative observations, from observing some of the Universe’s first stars and galaxies to studying the composition of the atmospheres of nearby exoplanets.
Mike Wall is the author of “Out there (opens in new tab)(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for extraterrestrial life. Follow him on Twitter @michaelwall (opens in new tab). Follow us on Twitter @spacedotcom (opens in new tab) or on face book (opens in new tab).
