NASA: James Webb Telescope captures a supernova that had been photographed by Hubble 20 years ago

He James Webb Space Telescope (NASA, ESA, JAXA and Canadian Space Agency) is here to open the eyes of science in a way no tool has ever done before. Its scope offers levels of detail about the deepest regions of the universe, which have never been recorded.

That in no way dismisses the work done by the Hubble Space Telescope. The old orbital observatory is still a very useful tool for exploring the secrets that the cosmos hides.

However, it cannot be denied that the difference in what both telescopes achieve is abysmal. It is NASA itself that compares the details of a phenomenon that occurs in the Milky Way captured by the two observatories about 20 years apart.

According to a report published in the NASA official sitethe James Webb Space Telescope has recorded among its data the appearance of the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A, located about 11 thousand light years away.

This image appears in the infrared from James Webb. It shows this star explosion that occurred 340 years ago, the youngest yet detected, “making it a unique opportunity to learn more about how such supernovae occur,” says NASA.

“Cas A represents our best chance to look at the debris field of an exploded star and perform a kind of stellar autopsy to understand what kind of massive star was there beforehand and how it exploded,” explains Danny Milisavljevic of Purdue University in West Lafayette. Indiana, principal investigator for the Webb program that captured these observations.

“Compared to previous infrared images, we see incredible detail that we haven’t been able to access before,” added Tea Temim of Princeton University in Princeton, NJ, a co-investigator on the program.

This is how it looks under the lens of James Webb

So it was with Hubble