A research team led by the University of Minnesota Twin Cities has measured the size of a star that has been around for more than 11 billion years. Detailed images show the cooling of the exploding star, which could help scientists learn more about the early universe. Nature publishes the paper.
Patrick Kelly is a lead author of the paper and an associate professor at the University of Minnesota. We can learn a lot about an individual star when the universe was less than a fifth of its current age, and begin to understand if the stars that existed millions of years ago are different from the ones nearby.
The red supergiant is about 500 times larger than the sun and is located at redshift three, which is 60 times farther away than any other supernova.
The researchers were able to identify multiple detailed images of the red supergiant using data from the Hubble Space Telescope and the Large Binocular Telescope. The light coming from the star is magnified by this.
Hubble's power is increased by a factor of eight by the use of the gravitational lens. We see three pictures. Even though they can see the same thing at the same time, they show a different version of the same event. We can reconstruct what happened and study how the supernova cooled in its first few days with just one set of images. It makes it possible to see a repeat of a supernova.
When the universe was a small fraction of its current age, the researchers combined this discovery with another Kelly discovery to estimate how many stars would explode. They discovered that there were more than they thought.
The deaths of stars are marked by core-collapse supernovae. The number of core-collapse supernovae we detect can be used to understand how many giant stars were formed in the early universe.
There is more information about the shock cooling of a red-supergiant supernova. It's 10.1038 and it's referred to as s41586.
Journal information: Nature
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