The star is about 30 times more massive than our sun and has already shed 10 suns' worth of gas and dust.
"Massive stars race through their life cycles, and only some of them go through a brief Wolf-Rayet phase before going supernova, making Webb's detailed observations of this rare phase valuable to astronomers," NASA officials wrote in a"Wolf-Rayet stars are in the process of casting off their outer layers, resulting in their characteristic halos of gas and dust," agency officials added.
JWST's observations could shed light on this mysterious"dust budget surplus," they added. That's because cosmic dust is best studied in infrared wavelengths, the type of light that JWST is optimized to observe. "Before Webb, dust-loving astronomers simply did not have enough detailed information to explore questions of dust production in environments like WR 124, and whether the dust grains were large and bountiful enough to survive the
and become a significant contribution to the overall dust budget," NASA officials wrote."Now those questions can be investigated with real data."
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