NASA mission experts have unveiled a stunning new image of a huge star on the cusp of exploding, taken by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).
Wolf-Rayet stars are known to be efficient dust producers, and the Mid-Infrared Instrument onthe NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope shows this to great effect. Cooler cosmic dust glows at the longer mid-infrared wavelengths, displaying the structure of WR 124’s nebula. The 10 light-years-wide nebula is made of material cast off from the ageing star in random ejections, and from dust produced in the ensuing turbulence.
The primary mirror of JWST is composed of 18 hexagonal segments made of beryllium and coated with a super-thin layer of gold, which makes it an ideal material for reflecting infrared light. That’s six times more light-collecting power than the Hubble Space Telescope. To detect infrared light successfully JWST has to remain insanely cold. Made of kapton, its five-layer sun-shield is as large as a tennis court and functions like a parasol by dividing the observatory into a warm side facing the sun, and a cold side . The layers are separated by a vacuum, which serves as an insulator.
It was launched on Christmas Day in 2021 and has since February 2022 been orbiting the L2 point, which is about a million miles/1.6 million kilometers from Earth—four times the distance of the Earth to the Moon—on the opposite side to the Sun. It revealed its first images on July 12, 2022.
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