Bright hot star known as Wolf-Rayet 124 (WR 124)
Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Webb ERO Production Team
A star about 15,000 light-years away is preparing to explode as a supernova. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has captured a beautiful image of a massive star known as a Wolf-Rayet star as it begins to shed its outer layers before exploding in a supernova.
This star is called WR 124 and has about 30 times the mass of the Sun. When massive stars run out of hydrogen burning in their cores, they start merging heavier elements instead. This fusion creates a powerful blast of energy that blows gusts of wind at speeds of millions of kilometers per hour.
Powerful winds strip away the star’s outer layers, resulting in giant clouds of dust and gas, such as those revealed in this JWST image. Researchers have calculated that WR 124 has already lost about 10 times the mass of the Sun.
When a star runs out of heavy elements it can fuse with, it explodes. The Wolfrayer he phase of the life of a massive star is relatively short, taking at most millions of years before the star explodes.
However, the dust that stars produce at that time could be cosmologically significant. Details from the JWST observations should help astronomers figure out exactly how this dust behaves and whether dust particles are large and abundant enough to survive an oncoming supernova. .
This is not only because of the role dust plays in the evolution of the universe, but also because it forms the environment in which the building blocks of the universe grow. Determining how dust behaves around a Wolf-Rayet star like WR 124 is also about where the extra dust comes from. It will help you understand where you are coming from.
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- Performer/
- james webb space telescope
