This year saw an extraordinary number of awe-inspiring images of objects in space, thanks in part to the James Webb Space Telescope. Here are the ones that dazzled us most and why they are important
By Leah Crane
13 December 2023
Right: Wolf-Rayet star WR 124 as glimpsed by JWST
NASA, ESA, CSA, STSCI and ERO Production Team
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has helped make 2023 a year of astonishing cosmic images. But the groundbreaking telescope was far from the only source of visual wonderment, because a series of new missions sent back pictures from space, and the view from Earth wasn’t bad either. Here are six of the images that dazzled us the most.
The star in the top picture was caught by JWST getting ready to explode. It is called WR 124 and is about 30 times the mass of the sun.
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When stars that big run out of hydrogen to burn in their core, they begin to fuse heavier elements instead. This fusion creates powerful blasts of energy, blowing out gusts of wind at velocities in the millions of kilometres per hour. When those powerful winds strip away the outer layers of the star, it becomes what is known as a Wolf-Rayet star.
Within a few million years of being stripped, it blows up in a supernova. The purplish blotches in this picture are the clouds of dust and gas that used to be WR 124’s outer layers – it has already lost about 10 times the mass of the sun – and without those layers intact, it is now doomed to go supernova.
A solar tornado seen from Earth Andrew McCarthy and Jason Guenzel