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Space
Space
Science
Robert Lea

James Webb Space Telescope discovers one of the earliest 'truly gargantuan' supernovas ever seen

(main) An illustration of a massice star going supernova in the early universe (inset) the supernova 2023adsv as seen by the JWST in 2022 and 2023.

Supernovas in the early universe just hit different. Especially when the stars that exploded was a stellar monster 20 times the mass of the sun.

Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have discovered one of the most distant and, thus, earliest star-killing supernovas ever seen. This blast, which rocked the cosmos around 2 billion years after the Big Bang, marked the death of just such a monster star.

This supernova, detected as part of the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES) program, could help scientists add more detail to the cosmic picture of stellar life and death they are currently building.

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