Quyllur – the unprecedented giant red monster has just appeared before the eyes of the advanced James Webb Space Telescope, showcasing images not of the present, but from 10.7 billion years ago.
This is a colossal, bright red, and mysterious space entity from the early universe that a team of scientists led by astronomer Jose Diego from the Cantabria Institute of Physics believes could represent a type of “red supergiant star.”
According to Sci-News, red supergiant stars are the evolutionary descendants of large stars with initial masses 7 to 40 times that of the Sun. They are the largest stars known, although not the most massive, as they are celestial bodies that have become “bloated.”
Three objects emerging from the past, with the large red object being the monstrous “red supergiant star” Quyllur – (Photo: NASA/ESA/CSA)
Stars, including our Sun, will exhaust their energy towards the end of their life and expand into a new form known as a red giant, significantly larger than their original size. After some time, red giants will end their brief life by collapsing into white dwarfs.
Returning to the intriguing object, it has been nicknamed “Quyllur.” It appears eerily in the data from the James Webb Space Telescope, primarily operated by NASA with support from ESA and CSA (the European and Canadian space agencies). The James Webb is currently the space telescope with the best observational capabilities.
Thanks to this, the aforementioned red supergiant monster, located 10.7 billion light-years away, has still been captured by the James Webb’s lens. It resides in a massive ancient galaxy cluster known as El Gordo.
Currently, the star may have collapsed long ago and vanished into the universe in a supernova billions of years ago. However, due to its vast distance, the images from its “golden age” 10.7 billion years ago took that much time to reach the Earth’s telescope. In other words, we are looking at the ghost of an object “transcending time” from the cosmic dawn.
This red supergiant monster has a surface temperature of about 2,800 degrees Celsius, which is relatively “cool” compared to G-type stars like the Sun, thus emitting a redder light. In the universe, the hotter an object is, the bluer its light; cooler objects shift towards white, yellow, and orange, with the coldest emitting red light.
About 33-49 light-years away from Quyllur is a pair of unclear, dim, and more diffuse blue objects, possibly a star formation region and also a “transcending time” image. With a distance of 10.7 billion light-years, the spectacular cluster of objects formed when the universe was just 3.1 billion years old.
Quyllur is also the first red supergiant star to be “unearthed” from the early universe. Research on Quyllur has just been published online on arXiv.org.
