TEMPO.CO, Jakarta – Astronomers have witnessed star giant exploded in a fiery supernova for the first time. The spectacle was even more explosive than the researchers had anticipated.
For scientist began observing the star — a red giant named SN 2020tlf and located about 120 million light-years from Earth — more than 100 days before its last and cataclysmic collapse, according to a new study published Jan. 6 in the Astrophysical Journal.
During that time, the researcher see stars erupt in bright flashes of light as large plumes of gas burst out of the star’s surface.
These pre-supernova fireworks came as a big surprise, as previous observations of a red supergiant about to detonate its peak showed no trace of violent emission, the researchers said.
“This is a breakthrough in our understanding of what massive stars do just moments before they die,” said study lead author Wynn Jacobson-Galán, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley in a statement. “For the first time, we are witnessing a red supergiant star exploding!”
Red supergiants are the largest stars in the universe in terms of volume, measuring hundreds or sometimes more than a thousand times the radius of the sun. While they may be large, red supergiants are not the brightest or most massive stars.
Like our sun, these massive stars generate energy through the nuclear fusion of elements in their cores. But because of their enormous size, these red giants can form elements much heavier than the hydrogen and helium that our sun burns.
As supergiants burn more massive elements, their cores become hotter and more pressurized. Ultimately, as they begin to combine iron and nickel, these stars run out of energy, their cores collapse and they eject the gas-filled outer atmosphere into space in catastrophic Type II supernova explosions.
Scientists have observed red supergiants before they became supernovae, and they have studied the consequences of these cosmic explosions. However, they had never seen the entire process happen in real time until now.
The authors of the new study began observing SN 2020tlf in the summer of 2020, when the star flashed with bright flashes of radiation that the team later interpreted as a gas explosion from the stellar surface.
Using two telescopes in Hawaii — the University of Hawaii Institute of Astronomy’s Pan-STARRS1 telescope and the WM Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea — the researchers monitored the star for 130 days. Finally, at the end of that period, the star exploded.
The team saw evidence of a dense gas cloud surrounding the star at the time of its explosion. It is likely that the same gas was emitted by the star during the previous months, the researchers said. This suggests that the star began to experience violent explosions before its core collapsed in the fall of 2020.
“We’ve never confirmed such violent activity in a dying red supergiant where we’ve seen it produce such glowing emissions, then collapse and burn, until now,” study co-author Raffaella Margutti, an astrophysicist at UC Berkeley, said in a statement. his statement.
These observations suggest that the red supergiants underwent significant changes in their internal structure, resulting in chaotic gas explosions in their final months before collapsing, the team concluded.
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