James Webb telescope captures rare sputtering star on the brink of death

These dust clouds — intense plumes of citron, blush, and magenta — are not signs of blooming as they tend to be on Earth but the final sputters of a dying star in this new deep space image captured by the James Webb Space Telescope.

At the center of this blossom-like structure is a blue-white star, born 30 times more massive than the sun. Because it is old and close to collapsing into a black hole, it burns hotter and generates powerful gas winds. It’s called Wolf-Rayet 124(Opens in a new tab), a star in the midst of a rare and brief phase before going supernova.

Scientists released the new snapshot during the South by Southwest Conference & Festivals on Tuesday in Austin, Texas. The event included a NASA and European Space Agency expert panel to discuss the telescope’s latest scientific discoveries.

“This is Carl Sagan’s stardust concept, the fact that iron in your blood and the calcium in your bones were literally forged inside of a star that exploded billions of years ago,” said NASA astrophysicist Amber Straughn at the conference. “That’s what we’re seeing in this new image — that dust is spreading out into the cosmos and will eventually create planets, and this is how we got here.”

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Webb, the preeminent observatory in the sky, was built to see an early period of the universe, using a large primary mirror that can detect invisible light at infrared wavelengths. A lot of dust and gas in space obscures the view to extremely distant and inherently dim light sources, but infrared waves can penetrate through the clouds.

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The star showcased in the new image is located some 15,000 light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius. It is wrapped in a cocoon of gas and dust — shedded layers of the star commingled with complicated elements found deep inside a star like carbon. So far, it has sloughed off 10 sun’s-worth of material, according to researchers.

“Iron in your blood and the calcium in your bones were literally forged inside of a star that exploded billions of years ago.”

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A previous Webb study makes a strong case that Wolf-Rayet stars produce carbon-rich dust molecules, the same chemical that largely makes up humans and other life on Earth. Astronomers study these rare Wolf-Rayet stars for insight into how cosmic dust spreads through the universe, seeding new galaxies and stars, said Macarena Garcia Marin, an ESA scientist on the panel.

With Webb, scientists will try to better understand dust-making factories like this special star.

“We know that when the stars are this big, they live fast. They go through different stages in very quick time,” said Marin. “And only some of them end up being in this Wolf-Rayet (phase) to later on become a supernova.”