The James Webb has captured the image of a Wolf-Rayet star. But what they are? By the time you will finish reading this article, I promise you will have a idea about these kind of stars.
There are various stages in the evolution of stars and they all depends on how massive a star is. If a star is as massive as our Sun, then it will end up as a white dwarf after passing through the red giant phase in its evolution. What about the stars which are massive than our Sun. To measure the mass of stars, Astronomers uses a scale which is used by them to classify stars in different categories. Its called Solar Mass. One Solar Mass is the total mass of Sun. So if a star is massive than 1.4 solar mass, it will not end up as a white dwarf star, instead it will go into a supernova explosion and will become a black hole or a neutron mass depending upon how massive they are.
Massive stars die very fast and only some goes through the Wolf-Rayet phase. Wolf-Rayet stars, are more than 20 times massive than our Sun and loss their mass at a very high rate. They “live fast and die hard”, according to NASA. They lose their mass in form of powerful stellar winds. These winds eject material at a rate of 10 solar mass per million year at speeds of up to 3000 Km/s.
The average temperature of these stars is more than 24000°C.They are very rare objects and only few, about 220 are known in our galaxy. Due to such high temperatures, they have luminosities of up to a million times that of the Sun. Astronomers estimate that our galaxy itself may contain between 1000-2000 such objects, majority of them hidden by the dust.
They are thought to end their lives in a supernova explosion. They are named after the French astronomers Charles Wolf and Georges Rayet who studied the first example in 1867.