For the first time ever, astronomers have captured the expanding shockwave of an exploding star, and it looks as awesome as you’d expect. The shock wave itself lasts less than an hour, but by analyzing light taken in by Kepler every 30 minutes over a three-year period from 500 distant galaxies – a field of vision that included some 50 trillion stars – they were finally able to catch the blast. There is one problem: only one shock breakout was observed in the two supernova events.
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When a red supergiant star runs out of fuel and can no longer sustain itself, gravity causes its core to collapse in on itself. The Astrophysical Journal will publish the research paper, which can be read in full on arXiv. The boom they found was some 700 million light years away, and the start behind it was 300 times the size of our sun. But interesting things went on behind the stars, and Kepler captured that data, too.
The task of capturing images of any sudden catastrophic events ranging from a plane crash, vehicle wreck or supernova is not at all an easy task but holds a lot of significance for understanding the root cause of the event.
A supernova results in vital elements spreading throughout the star’s galaxy.
All the silver, nickel and copper here on Earth comes from stars going supernova, said Steve Howell, project scientist for NASA’s Kepler mission.
According to Peter Garnavich, the team’s lead astrophysics professor, the only way to catch the event was to have Kepler continuously monitoring the stars.
Researchers are captivated by supernovae because many complex chemicals are created and spread when a star explodes, winding up across space and on other different stars and planets.
In this case, just the larger star – KSN 2011d – delivered a shock breakout.
While both explosions delivered a similar energetic punch, no shock breakout was seen in the smaller of the supergiants.
Kepler’s primary mission ended in 2013 with the failure of reaction wheels that helped keep it steady, but scientists are doing a second mission called K2 with the telescope. That’s hard – however, NASA has managed just that.
A shockwave produced by a supernova was previously detected in X-ray as opposed to visible light but that happened by chance at the same time astronomers were observing another exploding star, Tucker said.
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After the implosion of the old star, a shock wave rushes up toward its surface – breaking through in jets of plasma. “That’s no mean feat when this early burst only lasted roughly 20 minutes, and the target star was a whopping 1.2 billion light years away”.
