Images taken by JWST reveal the star that became SN2025pht before it exploded, providing our best view of a red supergiant proto-supernova. The cloud of dust hiding the star from our eyes may answer the question of why we haven’t seen more. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.

SN2025pht was spotted on June 29 this year. Its location, 40 million light-years away in the galaxy NGC 1637, makes it one of the closer supernovae of recent times, but there have been a few twice as close . More significantly, because NGC 1637 is a relatively nearby galaxy, it had drawn the attention of JWST twice before the explosion. This allowed astronomers to scour images from before the event to identify the star responsible and see it in detai

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