James Webb Telescope Catches Triplets Of Galactic Clusters Hosting Supernova

JAKARTA - James Webb Space Telescope is again presenting amazing images from outer space. This time, three copies of the same galaxy cluster housed a supernova, the brightest and most catastrophic type of space explosion known.

The galactic or cosmic cluster triplets aren't a flawed telescope image, but rather a quirk of nature called gravitational lensing, something predicted in Albert Einstein's Theory of General Relativity more than a century ago.

The image shows a large galaxy cluster called RX J2129, located 3.2 billion light years away, acting as a magnifying glass and bending light from galaxies farther behind it.

That's why some of the galaxies are stretched toward the top right of the image, captured by the Webb Telescope's NIRCam instrument.

Within this triple-lens galaxy is a very bright event, a Type Ia supernova. This occurs when a small but dense star called a white dwarf becomes part of a binary system with another star and attracts material from its partner.

This continues until there is too much mass in the white dwarf and it collapses, then explodes in a very bright flash of light, as quoted by Digital Trends, Monday, March 6.

The light from this Type Ia supernova is important for two reasons. First, it is so bright that it can be seen even from other galaxies. Second, it has a consistent luminosity.

This means researchers can see very distant Type Ia supernovae and accurately know how far away they are, making them useful for measuring cosmological distances. These objects are called standard candles.

The researchers collected data using Webb's other instrument, the NIRSpec spectrogram, to measure the composition of the supernova.