Extraordinary: the Webb Space Telescope recorded a rare moment of a star exploding - voila! technology

The explosion of a Wolf-Rayet type star (Photo: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Webb ERO Production Team)

Wolf-right stars are stars at an advanced stage in their lives, losing mass rapidly.

Their lifespan is very short, so it is rare to find them in the sky.

Webb actually recorded one, a cosmic fragment before it exploded last June.

The star, WR 124, is 15,000 light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius.

Wolf-right stars, usually 25 times more compact than our Sun, are in the process of shedding their pre-explosion outer layers, which characterizes them with a large and impressive halo of gas and dust.

For comparison, WR 124, has a mass 30 times greater than our sun, and shed material equal to ten of our suns.

When the ejected gas moves away from the star and cools, dust is created that shines in the infrared range, which Webb knows how to detect and record.

In video: NASA released first images from the James Webb Space Telescope (NASA)

This record is of great value to scientists studying the subject, as before Webb, there were simply no proper tools to estimate the amount of cosmic dust that the Wolf-Rayet star produces.

And are the grains large enough to survive the supernova, and become part of the dust left behind by the star.

Now, there is information that can answer these questions.

The rare Wolf-Rayet stars, like WR 124, help astronomers understand a critical period in the formation of the universe.

Dying stars seeded the young universe with heavy elements that are found in the cores of younger stars, such as Earth.

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• James Webb