April 8 (UPI) — NASA’s powerful James Webb Telescope has returned a new image of an exploding supernova star, giving scientists never-before-seen details, the space agency confirmed Friday.
The detailed photo provides greater insight into the Cassiopeia A supernova, which exploded 340 years ago, the youngest known remnant from such an explosion in our Milky Way Galaxy, NASA said in a statement.
The image, itself, comes from the telescope’s Mid-Infrared Instrument, which provides greater detail than previous infrared imaging. That image is then translated into visible-light wavelengths.
The $10 billion telescope launched on Christmas Day in 2021. It has been sending back images since, giving astronomers “unprecedented views” of our own galaxy and beyond.
“Cas A represents our best opportunity to look at the debris field of an exploded star and run a kind of stellar autopsy to understand what type of star was there beforehand and how that star exploded,” Purdue University researcher Danny Milisavljevic, principal investigator of the Webb program that captured the observations, said in a statement
“Compared to previous infrared images, we see incredible detail that we haven’t been able to access before,” said Princeton University scientist and co-investigator Tea Temim.
