The James Webb Space Telescope has captured what is known as a Wolf-Rayet star, the brief phase that comes just before it goes supernova.
A large, bright star shines from the centre with smaller stars scattered throughout the image. A clumpy cloud of material surrounds the central star, with more material above and below than on the sides, in some places allowing background stars to peek through. The cloud material is yellow closer to the star.
“Massive stars race through their life cycles, and not all of them go through a brief Wolf-Rayet phase before becoming a supernova, making Webb’s detailed observations valuable to astronomers,”“Wolf-Rayet stars are in the process of casting off their outer layers, resulting in their characteristic halos of gas and dust. The star WR 124 is 30 times the mass of the Sun and has shed 10 Suns-worth of material — so far.
The background stars and galaxies in the image provide a sense of scale to the colored gas and dust that are visible in the photo — it’s being ejected over an area 10 light-years across. Speaking of dust, the ESA explains that this matter is very important to the way the Universe works, from how stars ar formed to how it gathers together to form planets.
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