Peering deeply into the cosmos, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is giving scientists their first detailed glimpse of supernovae from a time when our universe was just a small fraction of its current age. This groundbreaking discovery is part of the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES) program, which utilizes observations taken by the telescope.
Unveiling the Universe’s Explosive Past
A team of astronomers meticulously analyzed JADES data and identified approximately 80 objects that changed in brightness over time. Supernovae or burst stars are the cause of the majority of these objects, sometimes referred to as transients.
Prior to this survey, only a handful of supernovae had been found above a redshift of 2, which corresponds to when the universe was only 3.3 billion years old — just 25% of its current age. Nonetheless, a large number of supernovae that burst even more recently, when the universe was younger than 2 billion years old, are found in the JADES sample.
Remarkably, it includes the farthest one ever spectroscopically confirmed, at a redshift of 3.6. Its progenitor star exploded when the universe was only 1.8 billion years old.
A Supernova Discovery Machine
Christa DeCoursey, a third-year graduate student at the Steward Observatory and the University of Arizona in Tucson, aptly described Webb as a “supernova discovery machine.” The sheer number of detections, combined with the great distances to these supernovae, marks the two most exciting outcomes from the survey. These newfound exploding stars provide crucial data for measuring the universe’s expansion rate and understanding its early evolution.
Webb’s unique capabilities make it ideal for finding extremely distant supernovae. As their light travels across the vast cosmic expanse, it gets stretched into longer wavelengths due to cosmological redshift. This phenomenon allows Webb to detect these ancient stellar explosions, providing a window into the universe’s explosive past.
