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 during that time could be of cosmological significance. It should help us to know exactly if it is large and abundant enough to
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, but researchers believe that our best theory of dust formation explains. Determining how dust behaves around a Wolf-Rayet star like WR 124 is a question of where the excess dust comes from. It will help you understand where you are coming from.
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- james webb space telescope
