NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope recently took a great picture of WR124, a type of star called a Wolf-Rayet star. This special star is surrounded by a lot of gas and dust which form patterns and looks colorful in infrared light. Even though it looks like this could be the end of the star, astronomers actually see this as an amazing opportunity to learn more about how new things are made in space – including some of the materials that are used to make life on Earth.
Investigating the Star WR 124 with NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope spotted a very special star in June 2022. It was called the Wolf-Rayet star and it is really bright, really big and only detectable for a short while. The Telescope showed us this star, called WR 124, with its powerful infrared light. It is located around 15,000 lightyears away in the constellation Sagittarius.
Massive stars have short lifespans, and sometimes they go through a phase called Wolf-Rayet before becoming supernovas. Astronomers think it’s important to pay attention to this rare phase because of the star WR 124. WR 124 is 30 times bigger than our Sun and has already lost the same mass as 10 Suns! As the gas moves away from the star and cools down, cosmic dust forms and becomes visible in infrared light that can be seen with instruments like the Webb Telescope.
Astronomers are curious about how dust, which is seen in the infographic above, can resist an explosion like a supernova and become part of the universe. Dust plays a really important role in letting stars form and collecting particles together to make planets. It’s even involved in the creation of life here on Earth. However, there’s more dust around than current theories show that was expected – it looks like having a surplus of space dust!
The new telescope called Webb allows us to look at tiny details of cosmic dust in the only way possible – with light of infrared wavelengths. Webb’s two special cameras, NIRCam and MIRI, help scientists figure out the structure of clouds of gas and dust around a star named WR 124. Before Webb existed we couldn’t do this so easily, but now we have enough information to answer questions about the formation and survival of those dust grains.
Stars like WR 124 play an important role in helping scientists learn more about what happened in the early universe. These stars are the source of many heavy elements, the same kind that make up our world today. Webb’s detailed image of WR 124 will help us eventually understand more about cosmic dust.
The James Webb Space Telescope is the most powerful telescope that has ever been built. Its main purpose is to try and answer questions about our solar system, other planets around different stars, and how the universe was formed. This project is led by NASA along with help from the European Space Agency (ESA) and Canadian Space Agency (CSA).
The north and east compass arrows show the orientation of the image on the sky. Note that the relationship between north and east on the sky (as seen from below) is flipped relative to direction arrows on a map of the ground (as seen from above).
The scale bar is labeled in light-years, which is the distance that light travels in one Earth-year. One light-year is equal to about 5.88 trillion miles or 9.46 trillion kilometers.
The color key at the bottom of the image shows which instrument filters were used and which visible-light color they have been assigned to create the image.
Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Webb ERO Production Team
