Stars, like our Sun, are giant balls of gas that emit radiation. Because the star doesn’t emit all of the released energy but retains it, the temperature continues to rise to over a million degrees. At some point, the star gets so hot that it explodes. Punishment? An impressive spectacle of light that can shine up to 3 billion times brighter than the sun. However, the beginning of this light spectacle was never observed as “live” because this phase can only be observed for a few days, which is a very short period of time for detecting and recording extraterrestrial phenomena.
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Using data from Kepler, the space telescope operated by NASA, Australian astrophysicists were able to capture the first burst of light from such a supernova. In an article published in a professional magazine Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society They described the light show as a yellow giant, about 100 times larger than the Sun. They stress the importance of images, which can help researchers better understand what happens to stars when they “die”.
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The supernova, named SN2017jgh, is more than a billion light years from Earth. “The light we see left the star a billion years ago,” said lead researcher Patrick Armstrong.
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How rare is such a supernova? Astronomers estimate that one star in each galaxy explodes every 100 years. There are probably between 100 and 200 billion galaxies in our universe. “Depending on the quality of your camera, you could therefore see one supernova per week or even one supernova per day – in the case of the Kepler telescope.”
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