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2w ago

JWST Identifies Dust-Hidden Red Supergiant as Progenitor of Supernova SN2025pht

Peer-reviewed analysis pinpoints a carbon-rich, heavily obscured star in NGC 1637 using infrared data.

Using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, an international team has captured the most detailed glimpse yet of a doomed star — marked in the box above — before it exploded. The discovery may help solve the decades-old mystery of why massive red supergiants rarely explode. Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Charles Kilpatrick, Aswin Suresh
Image

Overview

  • Researchers report the first James Webb Space Telescope detection of a supernova progenitor, published October 8 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
  • Pre-explosion JWST images were aligned with Hubble data using 36 reference stars, matching a single point source to the SN2025pht site.
  • The progenitor was intrinsically about 100,000 times the Sun’s luminosity yet appeared over 100 times dimmer in visible light due to thick circumstellar dust.
  • Spectral clues indicate the dust was unusually carbon-rich rather than the typical oxygen-rich silicates, suggesting late-stage internal mixing in the star.
  • The result supports the view that many massive red supergiants are hidden by dust from optical surveys and sets a path for expanded searches with JWST and NASA’s upcoming Roman Space Telescope.