James Webb Space Telescope Captures, Studies Supernova Remnant

NASA is studying the remains of a giant celestial object.

The space agency's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST or Webb for short) recently captured a photo of a supernova remnant with its instruments, resulting in pictures that showcased it in a new light.

Experts are using Webb's photos to study the origins of cosmic dust and life as we know it.

Webb Cassiopeia A Remnant Photo Details

Webb recently captured an image of a supernova remnant known as Cassiopeia A (Cas A) using its Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), showing details experts possibly missed when viewed with any other telescope. According to NASA, the colors of the new Cas A image contain numerous scientific information that its team is starting to tease out.

Tea Temim of Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey, a co-investigator on the program, mentioned that Webb's picture of Cas A shows "incredible detail" that previous infrared images couldn't display before, allowing them to access new information about the supernova.

For instance, the top and left portions of the picture show orange and red colors due to emission from warm cosmic dust, marking where ejected material from the exploded star is ramming into surrounding circumstellar gas and dust.

Meanwhile, the interior of the remnant comes with mottled filaments of bright pink with clumps and knots attached to them; these clumps and knots shine due to a mix of various heavy elements like oxygen, argon, and neon, which are previously ejected material from the star that it came from.

Most prominently, however, is the green-colored loop that extends across the right side of the supernova's central cavity nicknamed "the Green Monster" in honor of Fenway Park in Boston, per Danny Milisavljevic of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana.

Milisavljevic is the principal investigator of the Webb program that captured these observations. He also mentioned that the loop is pockmarked with what look like mini-bubbles and that its shape and complexity are unexpected and challenging to understand.

Thanks to these pictures, scientists and astronomers could start to understand how early galaxies came to be filled with large amounts of cosmic dust and discover where they came from per Space.com.

"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," Milisavljevic said.

JWST MIRI Details

Webb's MIRI is an instrument jointly created by NASA and the European Space Agency that allows the telescope to detect longer infrared wavelengths. It does so by using its camera and spectrograph to see light in the mid-infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum, allowing humanity to see wavelengths our eyes cannot, per NASA's Webb page.

The instrument covers the wavelength range of 5 to 28 microns, enough to see the redshifted light of distant galaxies, newly forming stars, and faintly visible comets and objects in the Kuiper Belt.

The Kuiper Belt is a flat ring consisting of icy small celestial objects that revolve around the sun and beyond Neptune's orbit, per the Encyclopaedia Britannica.