Calculating the exact time of a star's demise is difficult because of the amount of debris that has been seen. Astronomers used NASA telescopes to study the spectacular remains of a supernova in a neighboring galaxy.
The debris from an explosion of a white dwarf star is known as the supernova remnant. After reaching a critical mass, the star underwent a thermonuclear explosion and was destroyed. Scientists use this type of supernova, called a Type Ia, for a wide range of scientific studies.
There is a small galaxy 160,000 light-years away from Earth. The data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope are shown in this image. Green, blue, and purple are shown in the X-rays with low, medium, and high energy levels. The remnant is shown in red and white by the optical data.
Astronomers used the data from Chandra and Hubble and the data from NASA's retired Spitzer Space Telescope to figure out how long ago the star in SNR0519 exploded. Scientists will be able to "rewind" the movie of stellar evolution that has played out since and figure out when it began.
The researchers compared Hubble images from 2010 to 2020 to see how fast the blast wave was. The astronomer determined that light from the explosion would have reached Earth about 670 years ago if the speed was towards the upper end of estimates.
It is possible that the material has slowed down since the initial explosion and that the explosion happened more recently than 670 years ago. There are clues provided by the Chandra and Spitzer data. The remnant's bright areas are where the slowest- moving material is located, and no X-ray emission is associated with the fastest moving material.
The results show that the blast wave crashed into dense gas around the remnant, slowing it down as it traveled. The time of the star's demise should be determined using additional observations with Hubble.
The August issue of The Astrophysical Journal contains a paper about these results.
More information: Evidence for a Dense, Inhomogeneous Circumstellar Medium in the Type Ia SNR 0519-69.0, arXiv:2207.08724v1 [astro-ph.GA] arxiv.org/abs/2207.08724 Journal information: Astrophysical Journal
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