Webb Telescope Detects Supernova
telescope surprised James Webb Space When scientists unexpectedly discover his first supernova, an explosion of a dying star, this discovery may open up a whole new field of research possibilities.
A few days following the start of the Webb Science Telescope’s operations, its camera (Nercam) spotted an unexpected bright object in a galaxy called SDSS. J141930.11 + 5251593, at a distance of regarding 3 to 4 billion light years from Earth. Five days, indicating that it may have been a supernova, it was discovered by chance shortly following the star exploded and new observations have been compared to archived data from the Hubble telescope to confirm that the light is new.
This discovery is surprising because the Webb telescope was not designed to search for supernovae. Such searches are usually done by large-scale telescopes that scan large parts of the sky over short periods of time, but the Webb telescope searches in great detail in a very small region of the universe.
For example, a deep field image published in mid-July 2022, covered an area the size of a grain of sand.
Since the discovery came in the first week of Web telescope operations Scientists believe that the depth of the Webb’s images may actually compensate for the small area, as each deep image contains hundreds of galaxies, which means hundreds of opportunities to discover a supernova.
This discovery suggests that the WSP telescope may be able to see supernovae on a regular basis, especially because it is expected to see the first galaxies that formed in the universe, in the first hundreds of millions of years following the Big Bang.
The Webb telescope may be able to detect the explosion of one of the first-generation stars that lit up the universe following the early dark ages. Scientists believe that these stars have a much simpler chemical composition than stars born in later ages.
The stars in the first few million years are thought to have been essentially, almost entirely, made up of hydrogen and helium, unlike the kinds of stars we have now, they might have been massive – 200 to 300 times the mass of the Sun and live some kind of fast-paced lifestyle and die Small and seeing these types of eruptions has not been spotted yet.
The detection of a supernova marks the death of a star as young as 3 to 4 billion years old, but it’s a promising start for a telescope designed to do something somewhat different.
Supernovae are hard to spot because the explosion itself lasts only a fraction of a second and the bright bubble of dust and gas generated by these dying stars fades following only a few days, so the telescope needs to look in the right direction at the right time to spot one.
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