In yesterday's post we looked at mathematical inspirations. Let's continue the thread considering the connection between mathematics and space.
Math is essential for the observation and exploration of space: spaceflight and even high-res images of planets would not be possible without it, while equations describe the point where the James Webb Space Telescope resides. The telescope, an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency), and CSA (Canadian Space Agency), is the world's premier space science observatory.
The telescope sends us mesmerizing images like the ones showing the luminous, massive hot 8-pointed Wolf-Rayet 124 (WR 124) star.
First discovered by Charles Wolf and Georges Rayet in 1867, the Wolf-Rayet stars are very hot stars. During the Wolf-Rayet phase, an advanced stage of evolution of the most massive stars, the stellar wind becomes faster and remains strong, while the stellar ionizing photon rate increases. The next immediate stadium is the supernova explosion with consequent mass loss.
An image released by NASA yesterday shows WR 124 shining from the center with smaller stars scattered throughout the image and surrounded by a colorful halo of gas and dust. The cloud of material turns a pinkish purple at its outer edges, making the star and the cloud resemble a cherry blossom. The black background features many smaller white stars scattered throughout.
The star is 15,000 light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius; it is 30 times the mass of the Sun and has shed 10 Suns' worth of material so far.
The image shows WR 124 in unprecedented detail thanks to the telescope's powerful infrared instruments that also captured cosmic dust (cosmic dust glows at the longer mid-infrared wavelengths, displaying the structure of WR 124's nebula).
The image is extremely rare and very valuable to astronomers because only those stars greater than a certain mass go through the fleeting Wolf-Rayet phase before going supernova. The halo of gas and dust is produced by the process Wolf-Rayet stars go through of casting off their outer layers. As the ejected gas moves away from the star and cools, cosmic dust forms and glows in the infrared light detectable by Webb.
Astronomers are very interested in cosmic dust that can survive a supernova blast and contribute to what NASA calls the universe's overall "dust budget". Dust is indeed of vital importance to the universe as it shelters forming stars, gathers together to help form planets, and serves as a platform for molecules to form and clump together. The cosmic dust forming in the turbulent nebulas surrounding these types of stars, is composed of the heavy-element building blocks of the modern universe, Earth included. There is still more dust in the universe than astronomers' current dust-formation theories can explain.
Wolf-Rayet stars are known to be efficient dust producers and the telescope opens up new possibilities for studying details in cosmic dust, thanks to its Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI): the former balances the brightness of WR 124's stellar core and the details in the fainter surrounding gas; the latter reveals the clumpy structure of the gas and dust nebula of the ejected material now surrounding the star (the image released by NASA, the first one in this post, is a NIRCam and MIRI composite image of Wolf-Rayet 124; the second images is instead a MIRI image).
Astronomers were unable to carry out such studies on cosmic dust before the Webb telescope as they didn't have enough detailed information. Now they can study dust production in these environments and consider if dust grains were large and bountiful enough to survive the supernova and become a significant contribution to the overall dust budget.
Stars like WR 124 also serve as an analog to help astronomers understand a crucial period in the early history of the universe. Similar dying stars first seeded the young universe with heavy elements forged in their cores, elements that are now common in the current era, including on Earth.
There are a lot of elements in this story that could lead to great inspirations for both garments and accessories: starting from the colours of the composite image - those bright pink and fuchsia shades with speckles of blue, white and silver - that inspired NASA researchers to make a poetic comparison with cherry blossoms and the sakura season, to the theme of cosmic dust. But there are other themes to consider such as the rarity of the fleeting event, the evolutionary status of Wolf-Rayet stars and, last but not least, the fact that this picture shows an impending stellar death (what a theme – "stellar death"). Yet, while Webb essentially captured an image of the death of a star, astronomers also look to Wolf-Rayet stars for insights into new beginnings, which represents another theme. Who could have ever imagined that just one picture of a hot star going supernova could reward us with so many intriguingly enlightening ideas and luminous inspirations.
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