NASA releases never before scene images of famed exploding star

They don’t call it a super-nova for nothing.

Just in time for the holidays, NASA released dazzling images of an exploding star that looks eerily similar to a shiny ornament perched atop a Christmas tree.

The stunning new image of Cassiopeia A (Cas A), which lies roughly 11,000 light years from Earth and is one of the most well-studied supernova remnants, was captured by the agency’s famed James Webb Space Telescope.

The advanced technology of the telescope’s Near-Infrared Camera successfully captured the exploding star at a resolution that was previously unreachable.

“With NIRCam’s resolution, we can now see how the dying star absolutely shattered when it exploded, leaving filaments akin to tiny shards of glass behind,” Danny Milisavljevic of Purdue University, who leads the research team, said in a statement.

“It’s really unbelievable after all these years studying Cas A to now resolve those details, which are providing us with transformational insight into how this star exploded.”

In the new NIRCam image, Cas A’s infrared light colors were translated into ones that were previously invisible to the human eye, allowing researchers to notice details that had never been seen before.

Notably, the clumps represented in bright orange and light pink that make up the inner shell of the supernova were exposed, showing the “tiniest knots of gas” that will one day form new stars and planetary systems.

The outskirts of the manner inner shell of Cas A — which exploded about 340 years ago from our point of view — also lit up in deep orange and red hues in a shape that resembles smoke in a campfire.

One aspect that has so far stumped researchers is the massive loop of green light that glowed bright green in mid-infrared but vanished under the NIRCam.

Nicknamed the “Green Monster,” the ionized gas is likely the result of supernova debris pushing through and sculpting gas left behind by the star before it exploded.

Additionally, NASA scientists were “absolutely stunned” to find a blob in the bottom right corner of the camera’s view that “appears like an offspring of the main supernova.”

Located about 170 light-years behind the supernova remnant, Baby Cas A is a light echo, where light from the star’s long-ago explosion has reached and is warming distant dust, NASA said.

The incredible new images are just the latest in a series taken by the Webb telescope since becoming operational last year.

One of the many celebrating images it released depicted a colorful close-up of a dozen stars at the moment of birth, while another captured a dying star’s final “performance” in insane detail.