Unexpected discovery from NASA's James Webb telescope: Imaged a supernova 3 billion light years away
29Unexpected discovery from NASA's James Webb telescope: Imaged a supernova 3 billion light years away
The American Space and Aviation Administration's (NASA) James Webb telescope has captured a dying star three billion light-years from Earth for the first time. This event, called "supernova", occurs when a star's energy runs out, and the celestial body thus completes its life. The unexpected discovery could open up an entirely new field of study, the researchers said.
The James Webb Space Telescope surprised scientists by unexpectedly detecting the explosion of a dying star.
The James Webb Space Telescope's NIRCam camera detected an unexpectedly bright object in a galaxy named SDSS.J141930.11+5251593, about 3 to 4 billion light-years from Earth. The object in question darkened over a period of five days. This suggested that it might have been a supernova caught by sheer chance shortly after the star exploded.
WHAT IS SUPERNOVA?
A supernova is the violent explosion of massive stars that run out of energy. The luminosity of a supernova can reach a hundred million times the luminosity of the Sun, researchers report.
NOT DESIGNED TO CATCH SUPERNOVA
The researchers said the discovery was surprising, as the James Webb Space Telescope was not built to look for supernovae. That's because stellar-related events, such as supernovas, are often accomplished by large-scale survey telescopes that scan large areas of the sky at short intervals. James Webb looks at a very small area of the universe in detail.
A NEW OPPORTUNITY
On the other hand, since the new discovery came in the first week of James Webb's science operations, astronomers said the depth of the images from the telescope could be quite enough to detect supernovae. Each deep-field image contains hundreds of galaxies, meaning hundreds of opportunities to detect a supernova, the researchers reported.
Mike Engesser, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute who leads James Webb, said: "We think that stars that evolved in the first few million years were formed almost entirely of hydrogen and helium, unlike the types of stars we have now. These are 200 to 300 times the mass of the Sun. "Observing these kinds of explosions is something we haven't really done yet," he said.
"A HOLY BEGINNING"
On the other hand, Engessser added that the supernova detected by James Webb marks the death of a much younger star, only 3 to 4 billion years old, but that this is a promising start for a telescope designed to do something quite different.