Spectacular and detailed – James Webb telescope photographs cosmic rarity

It is one of the first images captured with the James Webb telescope, which launched in late 2021 and began operations in the summer of 2022. It shows a rare celestial object in unprecedented detail: a Wolf-Rayet star.

At the center of the recently released image — composed of multiple exposures and a combination of near and mid-infrared light — is the glowing and hot star Wolf-Rayet 124 (WR 124), 15,000 light-years away in the constellation Sagitta ( arrow ) is located.

Wolf-Rayet stars are the remnant cores of formerly massive stars that have lost and are still losing massive amounts of mass due to strong stellar winds. The stellar winds are driven by radiation; the light of the star, as it were, blows away the shell. This radiation accelerates the stellar winds to enormous speeds of up to 4,000 kilometers per second (14.4 million km/h).

For example, WR 124 is about 30 times more massive than the Sun, but has already ejected about 10 solar masses of gas over about 10,000 years. This gas cools at some distance from the star and condenses into dust. Astronomers know the resulting circumstellar nebula as M1-67.

Stretching 10 light-years through space, the M1-67 Nebula is not symmetrical but consists of random, asymmetrical ejecta. Bright blobs of gas and dust appear like tadpoles swimming toward the star, with tails sticking out behind them and being blown back by the stellar wind.

The Wolf-Rayet stars, which are not classified in any of the usual spectral classes but are classified in their own type, only exist for a relatively short time before finally exploding in a supernova. So they are the prelude to the last act in the existence of massive stars, in a sense their last convulsions. According to computer simulations, the lifespan of massive Wolf-Rayet stars is about 500,000 years.

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