A team of astronomers from the Australian National University (ANU), in collaboration with NASA and an international team of researchers, have captured never-before-seen photographs of an exploding giant star, 100 times larger than the Sun. Images of the supernova, the explosive death of stars, show a powerful burst of light as the first shock wave travels through the star before it explodes.
This has been possible thanks to a stroke of luck , since one of the problems with studying supernovae is that we never know when they will happen.
The ANU team captured the “great discovery” using NASA’s Kepler space telescope.
“This is the first time that anyone has had such a detailed view of a complete shock cooling curve in any supernova,” he said. “Because the initial stage of a supernova occurs so quickly, it is very difficult for most telescopes to record this phenomenon.” They saw that the event’s distinctive rise and fall occurred over a three-day period in the data captured by Kepler.
Astronomers used the new images to create a model to identify the exploding star that caused the supernova. They think it is most likely a rare yellow supergiant 100 times the size and about 17 times the mass of our Sun.
“We have shown that one model works better than the rest to identify different supernova stars, and it is no longer necessary to test many other models, as has traditionally been the case,” explains Patrick Armstrong, leader of the study published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society . “Astronomers around the world will be able to use SW 17 and be confident that it is the best model for identifying stars that become supernovae.”
Referencia: P Armstrong et al, SN2017jgh—A high-cadence complete shock cooling lightcurve of a SN IIb with the Kepler telescope, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (2021). DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stab2138
