“SN 2018ivc: The Unusual Bright Supernova That Came Back to Life”

For the first time astronomers see there supernova (SN) which is bright again. Strange! Moreover, the brightness of this supernova has dimmed in a few months.

In the course of their lives, massive stars end their lives in violent explosions that we know as supernovas. When a star explodes, of course, it increases in brightness rapidly and then dims within a few months.

On the double star

This supernova can occur in a single massive star or massive stars in a pair double star. For binary pairs, especially for nearby binary stars, the interaction between the two stars can result in mass transfer or in this case the transfer of matter from one star to another.

How come?

So, in pairs of close double stars, the companion star can devour material from the supernova forerunner star. During this process, the star that will end as a supernova will lose more material than if it is farther away from its companion star or if the star that is the forerunner of the supernova is a single star.

But what about star pairs that are neither too close nor too far or intermediate?

Meet, SN 2018ivc!

Another bright supernova

Astronomers from Kyoto University and Osaka University discovered the unusual supernova when they made observations with the ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array) radio telescope. SN 2018ivc, which had dimmed 200 days after the explosion, turned on, aka bright again 800 days later.

The computational modeling results show that the intermediate distance between SN 2018ivc and its companion star causes many interactions between the two. This interaction produced giant, hollow rings filled with star-forming material, some 1500 years before the supernova occurred.

When a supernova explosion occurs, it naturally increases in brightness and then dims after a certain amount of time. The same thing happened to SN 2018ivc. After bursting and shining for two hundred days, SN 2018ivc dimmed. Apparently this was caused by ejection of material when the explosion had not yet reached the hollow ring. However, on the 200th and 1000th days, the ejected material crashes into the hollow rings composed of star-forming matter and finally there is another increase in brightness.

Can you turn?

Cool Facts

Observations by the James Webb Space Telescope show that clusters of galaxies whose supernovae have increased in brightness three times. This is apparently caused by the bending of cosmic light which we know as the gravitational lensing effect. The galaxy cluster RX J2129 is 3.2 billion light years from Earth, in the constellation Aquarius.

Source: This article is a republished version developed from Indonesian edition of Space Scoop Universe Awareness. The Indonesian edition of Space Scoop is translated by Langitselatan.

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