James Webb detects his first supernova 3 billion light years from Earth

The brilliant light detected by NASA’s James Webb Telescope (JWST) three billion light years from Earth is believed to be the first $10 billion scope observation of a dying star’s explosion.

Officially known as a supernova, it is the ‘last hurray’ that occurs when a star runs out of fuel. This causes the pressure to drop, where the cosmic object expands to at least five times the mass of our sun – which is about 333,000 Earths in size – and then explodes, releasing tons of debris and particles.

A stellar explosion occurred in the galaxy SDSS.J141930.11+5251593, where a JWST image showed an object’s light dimming in the span of five days – a clue that fueled the supernova theory.

Also of interest is the fact that JWST was not designed to find and detect new transients, Mike Engesser of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), told Inverse, which first reported the discovery.

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Not only did James Webb see the supernova, but astronomers were baffled by the discovery because the telescope wasn’t designed to find dying stars.

The potential for supernovae was captured with the NIRCam instrument, which is designed to detect light from the earliest stars and galaxies using a wide range of infrared light.

NIRCam is equipped with coronagraphs, instruments that allow astronomers to take images of very faint objects around centrally bright objects, such as star systems or in this case, stellar explosions.

JWST is investigating distant galaxies, so catching a supernova is a stroke of luck, Engesser told Inverse.

The dying star, which appears as a small bright spot in the image, was not in the galaxy image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2011.

The team used software to analyze James Webb’s image with the same image taken by Hubble in 2011, that’s how they identified the tiny, bright light.

Engesser and his team used software designed to find differences in photos that lead to bright spots.

JWST has proven that it is money well spent even just a week after it aired. Not only did it send out its first official space image on July 12, but a week later scientists announced they had discovered a 13.5 billion year old galaxy that is now the oldest galaxy in the universe visible to the human eye.

The galaxy, called GLASS-z13 (GN-z13), formed just 300 million years after the Big Bang, which occurred 13.8 billion years ago.

The previous record holder, discovered by the Hubble Telescope in 2015, was GN-z11 which dates back 400 million years after the universe was born.

JWST captured the view of GN-z13 using the Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) instrument, which is capable of detecting light from the earliest stars and galaxies.

JWST has proven that it is money well spent even just a week after it aired. Not only did it send out its first official space image on July 12, but a week later scientists announced they had discovered a 13.5 billion year old galaxy that is now the oldest galaxy in the universe visible to the human eye.

While investigating the area was GN-z13, JWST also found GN-z11.

Scientists from Harvard and the Smithsonian Center of Astrophysics in Massachusetts note that although both are old, each galaxy is very small, reports New Scientist.

GN-z13 is about 1,600 light years away and GLASS z-11 is 2,300 light years away.

This is compared to our Milky Way which is about 100,000 light years in diameter.

The paper, published in arXiv, notes that both galaxies have the mass of one billion suns, because they formed shortly after the Big Bang.

The team suggested this happened as galaxies grew and devoured stars in the region.

‘These two objects have placed new limits on the evolution of galaxies in the cosmic dawn,’ the researchers shared in the paper.

‘They show that the discovery of GNz11 is not just a matter of luck, but that there may be a population of UV-luminous sources with very high star-forming efficiencies capable of compiling.’

James Webb Telescope: NASA’s $10 billion telescope designed to detect light from the earliest stars and galaxies

The James Webb telescope has been described as a ‘time machine’ that can help unravel the secrets of our universe.

The telescope will be used to look back at the first galaxies born in the early universe more than 13.5 billion years ago, and observe the source of stars, exoplanets, and even the moon and planets of our solar system.

The massive telescope, which has cost more than $7 billion (£5 billion), is thought to be the successor to the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope.

The James Webb telescope and most of its instruments have an operating temperature of around 40 Kelvin – about minus 387 Fahrenheit (minus 233 Celsius).

It is the largest and most powerful orbital space telescope in the world, capable of peering back 100-200 million years after the Big Bang.

The orbiting infrared observatory is designed to be about 100 times more powerful than its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope.

NASA likes to think of James Webb as Hubble’s successor rather than a successor, as the two will be working together for a while.

The Hubble Telescope was launched on April 24, 1990, via the space shuttle Discovery from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

It circles the Earth at about 17,000 mph (27,300 kph) in low Earth orbit at an altitude of about 340 miles.

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