A team of astronomers has detected something unusual about a distant galaxy in recent images from the James Webb Space Telescope, something that wasn’t there when Hubble last looked at the same galaxy. Finding short-lived cosmic events like supernovae is not what Webb was designed for , but the newly operational space telescope appears to be full of surprises.
A bright light detected by NASA’s James Webb Telescope (JWST) 3 billion light-years away from Earth is believed to be the telescope’s first observation of an exploding dying star.
A supernova occurs when the star runs out of fuel, causes the pressure to drop and the cosmic object expands to at least five times the mass of our sun, which is the size of about 333,000 Earths, and then detonates, releasing tons of debris. and particles.
The stellar explosion occurred in the galaxy , SDSS.J141930.11+5251593 , where JWST took images showing an object’s light dimming over a span of five days, a clue that triggered the supernova theory.
The potential supernova was captured with the NIRCam instrument, which is designed to detect light from early stars and galaxies using a wide range of infrared light.
The dying star, which appears as a small bright dot in the images, was not present in images of the galaxy taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2011. It is the first supernova detected by the Webb Telescope. It is extremely bright compared to the rest of the galaxy.
Because supernovae tend to fade away within a few months, astronomers usually can’t see their later stages, which could offer further clues as to what kind of star exploded, along with the physics of that stellar explosion. Webb’s deep insight into the universe could make the aftermath of a supernova like this easier to trace even several years later.
