Islamabad, 17 March 2023 (GNP): The uncommon and ephemeral phase of a star on the verge of dying has been caught by the James Webb satellite telescope.
The telescope made the observation among its first after it was launched in late 2021, but the image wasn’t made public until this week.
A massive, blazing star 15,000 light years away was the source of all the gas and dust that Webb’s infrared vision could see. There are 5.8 trillion miles in a light year.
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The leftover material was once the star’s outer coat and it now glistened purple like a cherry blossom.
A few decades ago, the identical transiting star was photographed by the Hubble space observatory, although it looked more like a fireball and lacked the fine details.
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According to astronomers, this kind of change only happens to a small number of stars and is typically the final phase before they go supernova.
Macarena Garcia Marin, a European Space Agency scientist who is part of the project remarked: “We’ve never seen it like that before. It’s really exciting.”
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According to NASA, this star in the constellation Sagitta, also known as WR 124, is 30 times bigger than our sun and has already expelled enough matter to make up for 10 suns.
