The striking colors of the new Cas A image, in which infrared light is converted to visible light wavelengths, contain a wealth of scientific information that the team is just beginning to tease out. On the outside of the bubble, particularly at the top and left, lie curtains of material that appear orange and red due to emissions from warm dust. This marks the point where the ejected material from the exploded star hits the surrounding circumstellar gas and dust.
Inside this outer shell lie mottled bright pink fibers dotted with clumps and knots. This represents material from the star itself, which glows due to a mixture of various heavy elements such as oxygen, argon and neon, as well as dust emissions.
“We’re still trying to separate all these sources of emissions,” said Ilse De Looze of Ghent University in Belgium, another co-investigator on the program. Stellar material can also be seen as fainter tufts near the interior of the cavity.
Perhaps most prominently, the loop shown in green stretches across the right side of the central cavity. “We named it the Green Monster after Fenway Park in Boston. If you look closely, you’ll notice that it’s studded with what look like mini-bubbles,” Milisavljevic said. “The shape and complexity are unexpected and challenging to understand.”
The origins of cosmic dust
Among the scientific questions that Cas A can answer are: Where does cosmic dust come from? Observations have found that even very young galaxies in the early universe are littered with massive amounts of dust. It is difficult to explain the origin of this dust without invoking supernovae, which spew large amounts of heavy elements (the building blocks of dust) through space.
However, existing observations of supernovae have not been able to conclusively explain the amount of dust we see in these early galaxies. By studying Cas A with Webb, astronomers hope to gain a better understanding of its dust content, which may help us better understand where the building blocks of planets and ourselves are made.
“In Cas A, we can spatially distinguish regions that have different gas compositions and see what kinds of dust formed in those regions,” Temim explained.
Supernovae like the one that created Cas A are essential to life as we know it. They spread elements like the calcium we find in our bones and the iron in our blood across interstellar space, seeding new generations of stars and planets.
“By understanding the process of exploding stars, we are reading our own origin story,” Milisavljevic said. “I will spend the rest of my career trying to understand what is in this data set.”
The remainder of Cas A is about 10 light-years across and is located 11,000 light-years away in the constellation Cassiopeia.
The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s leading observatory for space science. Webb will solve mysteries in our solar system, look further to distant worlds around other stars, and explore the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and the Canadian Space Agency.
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