by And you thought the Christmas dinner mess took a while to clean up. A newly revealed image of Cassiopeia A (Cas A), taken by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the spectacular wreck shows a supernova still shining like a cosmic Christmas ball some 340 years after a star violently exploded to create it.
Image of the supernova remains, located around 10,000 light year away from us, revealed as part of the Holidays 2023 at the White House celebration and the White House Advent Calendar for the first time ever with the First Lady Dr. Jill Biden and NASA on Sunday (December 10).
This supernova debris has been studied in detail across a range of wavelengths, but the new James Webb Space Telescope image is an “early Christmas” for astronomers as it shows Cas A – which is about 10 light-years across – in high detail. resolution. And, as the JWST’s specialty goes, the image was taken with infrared wavelength data.
“With the resolution of NIRCam, we can now see how the dying star completely broke apart when it exploded, leaving behind filaments like small pieces of glass,” Purdue University scientist Danny Milisavljevic said in a statement, referring to the JWST Near-Infrared Camera. “It’s incredible that after all these years of studying Cas A these details can now be resolved, giving us a game-changing view of how this star exploded.”
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The image taken by the JWST’s NIRCam follows up another image taken of Cas A, a portrait of itself another of the telescope’s instruments, the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI).This view, taken in April, revealed new and unexpected features in the expanding shell of stellar debris. Curiously, however, many of these features are not visible in the new JWST image, which lays out the mystery of Christmas for astronomers.
In theory, these features could be absent in this new image – which is less colorful than the earlier picture of Cas A – because different colors were assigned to different wavelengths of infrared light in the two images. This means that each of the colors represents a different physical process that occurs in the shell of cosmic matter.
The most visible colors in the NIRCam image are bright orange and light pink, representing the inner shell of Cas A. Within this region are rapid knots of sulphur, oxygen, argon and neon gas from the exploding star for over 10,300 years. since then. Because we see this wreckage as it was 10,000 years ago, some of the gas and dust inside will have already begun to drift away into the nascent interstellar dust clouds that will eventually collapse. new stars.
Also within this wreckage are filaments of dust and gas that are like 10 billion light-years across, but are still too small for even this ultra-powerful $10 billion telescope to resolve.
The Grinch is missing but ‘Baby Cas A’ is clear
The edges of Cas A’s main shell are visible in the image, but they are shown in darker orange and red colors and appear almost like smoke billowing around the destruction of this starburst. Here, the explosion from the supernova is still pushing out, ramming into surrounding “matter” – something too cool to be detected by the JWST.
The white colors in the image are the same electrons being accelerated by powerful magnetic fields to near-light speeds and emitting a type of radiation known as synchrotron radiation. This type of radiation is part of the bubble-like structures we see in the lower half of the inner cavity.
One remarkable feature of Cas A that is conspicuous because it is not in the NIRCam image is the “green monster” – scientists hope to see a green light on a Grinch-like loop in the core of the inner shell of the wreckage. It was the so-called monster seen in the April MIRI observations of the supernova wreck, however, that led researchers to describe its existence as something challenging to explain. However, antisocially, like Seuss’s creation, the remaining green monster still visible in this image may help explain the story.
Circular holes seen in the MIRI image can be made out in this NIRCam image, showing up as white and purple emissions indicating ionized gas formed as stellar debris passes through and eventually shapes the outer gas.
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One interesting new feature spotted by NIRCam is a blob of gas and dust that researchers have named “Baby Cas A.” This name is appropriate because the material spot appears to be the exit of the main wreckage of the supernova, or light from the explosion being reflected from hot dust that burns as it cools. Located about 170 light-years behind Cas A, Baby Cas A is likely to be of great interest to astronomers due to its complex dust patterns.
The NIRCam image also shows that Cas A is surrounded by another faint echo “offspring” of the main starburst—perhaps we are soon to investigate other bowls on JWST’s inexplicably large cosmic Christmas tree.
