Cape Canaveral, Florida.- The Webb Space Telescope captured a rare phase of a star about to die.
NASA showed the photo Tuesday during Southwest’s South conference in Austin, Texas.
The observation was one of the first made by Webb following its launch in late 2021. Its infrared eyes looked at all the gas and dust hanging in space by a huge hot star that is 15,000 light-years away. A light year is approximately 5.8 trillion miles.
Purple like cherry blossom, the material compressed the star’s outer shell. The Hubble Space Telescope took a picture of the same transitioning star a few decades ago, but it appears more like a ball of fire without fine detail.
Such a transformation occurred only with some stars and is usually the last step before they explode, becoming a supernova, according to scientists.
“We’ve never seen anything like that, it’s really exciting,” said Macarena García Marín, a scientist at the European Space Agency who is part of the project.
This star in the constellation Sagittarius, officially known as WR 124, is 30 times larger than our sun and has shed enough material for 10 suns, according to NASA.
