Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Space
  3. News

James Webb captures an extremely distant triple-lensed supernova

Georgina Torbet
By

Since the start of science operations of the James Webb Space Telescope in July last year, we’ve been treated to a flood of images showing space targets from nebulae to deep fields. This month, Webb researchers shared a new image captured by the telescope’s NIRCam instrument which shows a both gorgeous field of galaxies and an important astronomical phenomenon called gravitational lensing.

The image features a huge galaxy cluster called RX J2129, located 3.2 billion light-years away, which is acting as a magnifying glass and bending light coming from more distant galaxies behind it. That’s what is causing the stretched-out shape of some of the galaxies toward the top right of the image.

Related Videos
The massive galaxy cluster RX J2129.
This observation from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope features the massive galaxy cluster RX J2129. Gravitational lensing occurs when a massive celestial body causes a sufficient curvature of spacetime to bend the path of light traveling past or through it, almost like a vast lens. In this case, the lens is the galaxy cluster RX J2129, located around 3.2 billion light-years from Earth in the constellation Aquarius. ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, P. Kelly

One of the galaxies being lensed is particularly notable because it contains something special. Toward the top right, the same galaxy is imaged three times, due to the lensing effect. Within this triple-lensed galaxy is an exceptionally bright event, a Type Ia supernova. These occur when a small but dense star called a white dwarf is part of a binary system with another star and pulls material away from its companion. This continues until there is too much mass in the white dwarf and it collapses, then it explodes in a hugely bright flash of light.

The light from these Type Ia supernovae is important for two reasons: firstly, it is so bright that it can be seen even from another galaxy, and secondly, it is (usually) of a consistent luminosity. That means that astronomers can look at a very distant Type Ia supernova and accurately work out how far away it is, which makes it useful for measuring cosmological distances. These objects are called “standard candles.”

This image captures an extremely distant Type Ia supernova, and that is useful to tell researchers how strong the gravitational lensing effect must be. To confirm their results, researchers also collected data using another of Webb’s instruments, its NIRSpec spectrogram, to measure the composition of the supernova.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Astronomers share early images from James Webb’s galaxy survey
Images of four example galaxies selected from the first epoch of COSMOS-Web NIRCam observations, highlighting the range of structures that can be seen. In the upper left is a barred spiral galaxy; in the upper right is an example of a gravitational lens, where the mass of the central galaxy is causing the light from a distant galaxy to be stretched into arcs; on the lower left is nearby galaxy displaying shells of material, suggesting it merged with another galaxy in its past; on the lower right is a barred spiral galaxy with several clumps of active star formation.

One of the major aims of the James Webb Space Telescope is to observe some of the earliest galaxies in the universe, and to do that it needs to be able to see extremely distant objects. But looking at a particular very old galaxy in detail is only half of the problem. To truly understand the earliest stages of the universe, astronomers also need to see how these very old galaxies are distributed so they can understand the large-scale structure of the universe.

That's the aim of the COSMOS-Web program, which is using James Webb to survey a wide area of the sky and look for these rare, ancient galaxies. It aims to study up to 1 million galaxies during over 255 hours of observing time, using both Webb's near-infrared camera (NIRCam) and its mid-infrared instrument (MIRI) camera. While there is still plenty of observing left to do, the researchers in the COSMOS-Web program recently shared some of their first results.

Read more
Water was present in our solar system before the sun formed
This artist’s impression shows the planet-forming disc around the star V883 Orionis. In the outermost part of the disc water is frozen out as ice and therefore can’t be easily detected. An outburst of energy from the star heats the inner disc to a temperature where water is gaseous, enabling astronomers to detect it. The inset image shows the two kinds of water molecules studied in this disc: normal water, with one oxygen atom and two hydrogen atoms, and a heavier version where one hydrogen atom is replaced with deuterium, a heavy isotope of hydrogen.

You might assume that there has always been water on Earth -- that water was there from the very beginning when our planet formed. But scientists increasingly think that water on Earth may have originated elsewhere, and been carried here by comets. However, the water in the comets had to come from somewhere, and astronomers recently made a discovery which could shed light on how that water was found in the solar system.

The researchers used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), a radio telescope array in Chile, to study a planet-forming disc around the star V883 Orionis, looking for water there to see how it would be transported as the disk evolves into planets.

Read more
Hubble captures a messy irregular galaxy which hosted a supernova
The irregular spiral galaxy NGC 5486 hangs against a background of dim, distant galaxies in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The tenuous disk of the galaxy is threaded through with pink wisps of star formation, which stand out from the diffuse glow of the galaxy’s bright core.

This week's image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows a dramatic spiral galaxy called NGC 5486, which is shot through with wisps of pink showing regions where new stars are being born.

Located 110 million light-years away in the famous constellation of Ursa Major, this galaxy is a type called an irregular spiral galaxy because its arms are wandering and indistinct. If you compare the image of this galaxy to one of a quintessential spiral galaxy like NGC 2336, you'll see that a non-irregular spiral galaxy has clearly defined arms that reach out from its center and are symmetrical.

Read more