The image was captured by the James Webb Telescope and will be analyzed by astronomers to understand excess cosmic dust and the primordial history of the Universe.
It’s hard to catch a star about to die just before it explodes. “We’ve never seen it like this before. It’s really exciting,” European Space Agency scientist Macarena Garcia Marin told The Guardian. The image, from the James Webb Telescope last June and released at the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas this week, is not just a rare snapshot but a promise.” for the discoveries of the future they will reveal the mysteries shrouded in cosmic dust,” says NASA.
“Cosmic spring is in the air! The latest image from @NASAWebb shows a blooming Wolf-Rayet star, 15,000 light-years away. This rare phase is as fleeting as the cherry blossom it resembles,” NASA said. presented the rare shot of the dying star.
The WR 124 star, also known as Merrill’s
WR 124 is a star in the constellation of the Arrow, one of the brightest and largest ever discovered (its mass is about 30 times that of the Sun). It is nearly 11,000 light-years from Earth and lies at the center of the M1-67 nebula. It’s also called Merrill’s Star, and in the image taken by the James Webb Telescope it’s purplish, bright, and you can see the gas being expelled by the star during its dying phase, which NASA calls petals.
In fact, it was immortalized during the Wolf-Rayet stage, crossed by only a few stars, where the outer layers that envelop them in a ring of incandescent cosmic dust and gas are lost. “Wolf-Rayet stars shed their layers, giving rise to their characteristic halos of gas and dust,” explains NASA, “fortunately, Webb can study its dust ‘petals’ in detail.”
In fact, WR 124 appears surrounded by an incandescent nebula, which began to form around 10,000 years ago due to the intense stellar wind generated by the same star and violent flares on its surface.. The pinkish tint of the gas, the waste that once made up the outer layer of the star, is due to infrared light from the telescope.
How to solve the great mystery of dust in the universe
“The image will forever retain a short and turbulent period of transformation,” says NASA. Of particular interest is the dust emitted by the star, and through photography it can be studied in detail by astronomers. Dust is a crucial element in understanding how the universe works, protects forming stars, helps planets form and even affects life on earth. It’s not just in recent years that scientists have been confronted with a problematic fact: there’s more dust in the universe than their theories can explain, a gap they’ve dubbed the ‘Earth Crisis’. dust balance. WR 124 and the Webb telescope could shed some light on this mystery.
‘The telescope’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) reveals the structure of the lumpy nebula of gas and dust from the ejected material now surrounding the star,’ before the James Webb Telescope astronomers didn’t have enough information to study the dust of the universe, “They just didn’t have the data to explore the questions of dust production in environments like WR 124 and whether the dust grains were large and abundant enough to survive the supernova and become a major contributor to the overall dust budget. Now, however, they will be able to acquire the necessary data.
Study death to understand life
Additionally, stars like WR 124 are essential for studying the early history of the universe. “Such dying stars first seeded the young universe with heavy elements forged into their cores, elements that are now common in the current era, even on Earth,” NASA explains. It is true that we are talking about death, but in fact the click of the star can be an excellent clue to understanding life.
“It’s one of the coolest concepts in all of astronomy,” NASA astrophysicist Amber Straughn told CNN, “it’s Carl Sagan’s concept of stardust, the fact that the iron in your blood and the calcium in your bones were literally forged inside a star that exploded billions of years ago. And that’s what we see in this new image. This dust is spreading throughout the cosmos and will eventually create planets. And that’s how we got here, actually. »
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