The University of Montpellier and the John Moores University have come up with a system to alert the public when a star is about to explode. The work was published in a monthly publication.
The red supergiant phase of massive stars will suddenly become fainter in visible light in the last few months before they die. The star's light is obscured by material around it.
It wasn't known how long it took the star to put it together. For the first time, researchers have created simulations of how red supergiants might look when they are inside thecocoons.
There are images of stars that explode around a year after they're taken. The stars are normal in the images, meaning they can't build a theoretical circumstellar cocoon. It's thought that the cocoon is assembled in less than a year.
The star is 100 times fainter in the visible part of the spectrum due to the dense material. You wouldn't be able to see it on the day of the explosion. We haven't been able to get detailed observations of supernovae until now. We can watch them get ripped apart in front of our eyes with this early-warning system, because we can get ready to observe them real-time.
More information: Ben Davies et al, Explosion imminent: the appearance of red supergiants at the point of core-collapse, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (2022). DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stac2427 Journal information: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
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