It’s caught the earliest minutes of two exploding stars and, for the first time, the brilliant flash of supernova shockwave – what astronomers call the shock breakout – in visible light. The first star exploded more than 700 million light years away from Earth and its size was 300 times that of our sun.
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This particular star is called KSN 2011d, and it is about 1.2 billion light-years away and about 500 times the size of our sun.
“That is the puzzle of these results”, Garnavich said.
The worldwide team found a shockwave only in the smaller of two supernovae seen in 2011 to explode.
Analysis of the data from the supernovae also revealed that while both explosions were cataclysmic, no shock breakout was seen in the smaller of the two supergiants.
Researchers already had an idea about why a supernova occurs when a star runs out of the nuclear fuel and gravitational collapse takes over its surface. Garnavich, who is first author of a paper accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal (arXiv.org preprint). Supernovae are wonderful manifestation of energy – for brief moments, a supernova can outshine an entire galaxy, radiating as much energy as the Sun or any ordinary star is expected to emit over its entire lifespan, before fading after a few weeks or months.
By sifting through three years of data collected by Nasa’s now half-broken Kepler space telescope, an worldwide team of scientists have now seen the elusive shock breakout occur.
Supernoave is a massive explosion which happens in the final stages of a star’s life and causes the star to burn remarkably brighter.
The Kepler mission ended prematurely in 2013 following a technical failure, but NASA’s K2 mission is now searching even more galaxies for supernova events. Therefore, scientists believe that supernovae are an important reason life exists. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, managed Kepler mission development. Just as a building needs support beams to hold it up against gravity, the star is able to stay “inflated” due to a balance between gravity and the outward pressure of nuclear production. The cartoon video begins with a view of a red supergiant star that is 500 hundred times bigger and 20,000 brighter than our sun. The problem is, it seemed to happen in only one of two exploding stars observed.
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“The star was so large that the shockwave did not travel all the way to the surface”, Tucker said. The collapse creates a shockwave from within the star, rushing upward from its center, which breaks through the visible surface. Heavy metals and other elements are expelled by supernovae and travel great distances to lead to the formation of other planets, including Earth.
