NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has captured the rarely seen view of a Wolf –Rayet Star ready to go supernova. A Wolf-Rayet star is a star more than 20 times massive than our Sun. They have a very brief lifetime and loss mass at a high rate because of the powerful stellar winds. It is thought that the stellar winds eject about 10 Solar mass of material per million year at a speed of up to 3000 km/s. That’s why these stars are rare in the Universe. Around 220 are known to exist in our galaxy.
WR 124 is a wolf Rayet star that is ready to explode in a supernova. Webb has captured it in details with its powerful infrared instruments. The star is located around 15,000 light years in the constellation Sagittarius. The star is about 30 times the mass of Sun and is in a process of blowing off its outer layers, resulting in a halo of gas and dust in the outer space. As this ejected material, moves away from the star, it cools down and forms cosmic dust which glows in infrared light. James Webb Space Telescope was designed to work on the Infrared astronomy. The cosmic dust formed helps the Universe in making new stars, planets as the clumps of cosmic dust comes together.