by The James Webb Space Telescope has surprised scientists by unexpectedly discovering its first supernova, an explosion of a dying star. The detection could potentially open up a whole new area of research possibilities, say researchers.
Just a few days after the start of scientific operations, The James Webb Space TelescopeThe NIRCam camera detected an unexpectedly bright object in a galaxy called SDSS.J141930.11+5251593, about 3 to 4 billion light years from Earth. The bright object dimmed over a five-day period, suggesting it could have been one supernova, caught by sheer luck shortly after the star exploded. (The astronomers compared the new observations with archived data from The Hubble Space Telescope to confirm that the light was new.)
The discovery is surprising as the James Webb Space Telescope was not built to search for supernovae; a task usually performed by large-scale survey telescopes that scan large swathes of the sky at short intervals. Webb, on the other hand, looks in great detail into a very small area of universe. For example deep field image released by US President Joe Biden in mid-July, covered an area roughly the size of a grain of sand.
Gallery: The James Webb Space Telescope’s first images
Since the detection (opens in a new tab) came already in the first week of Webb’s scientific operations, astronomers believe that the depth of Webb’s images may actually compensate for the small area. Each deep-field image includes hundreds of galaxies – meaning hundreds of opportunities to detect a supernova.
The early discovery suggests that the telescope may be able to see supernovae on a regular basis, according to Reverse (opens in a new tab). That would be exciting, especially because Webb is expected to see the earliest galaxies formed in the universe, in the first hundreds of millions of years after The big bang. Combine that ancient view with its unexpected supernova detection, and Webb may be able to capture the explosion of one of the first-generation stars that lit up the universe after the dark early ages. These stars, astronomers believe, had a much simpler chemical composition than stars born in later eras.
“We think that stars in the first million years would have been mainly, almost exclusively, hydrogen and helium, as opposed to the types of stars we have now,” Mike Engesser, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which operates Webb, who led made as announced the discovery, told Inverse. “They would have been massive – 200 to 300 times the mass of ours sun, and they would definitely have lived a “live fast, die young” kind of lifestyle. Seeing these kinds of explosions is something we haven’t really done yet.”
The supernova that was discovered marks the death of a much younger star, one only 3 to 4 billion years old, but it’s a promising start for a telescope built to do something quite different.
Supernovae are difficult to detect since the explosion itself lasts only a fraction of a second. The bright bubble of dust and gas generated by these stellar deaths fades after just a few days, so a telescope must look in the right direction at the right time to catch one.
Now astronomers have to hope that Webb’s first supernova wasn’t just rookie luck.
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