An artist's depiction of a red supergiant star that was about to explode, emitting a violent eruption of radiation and gas on its dying breath before collapsing and exploding. The image was taken by W. M. Keck Observatory.
Astronomers watched a giant star blow up in a fiery supernova for the first time, and the spectacle was even more powerful than they anticipated.
The doomed star, a red supergiant located about 120 million light-years from Earth, was being watched by scientists for more than 100 days before it collapsed. The researchers saw the star erupt with bright flashes of light as gas exploded out of its surface.
The researchers said that previous observations of red supergiants showed no violent emissions.
The lead study author, Wynn Jacobson-Galn, a research fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, said in a statement that the study was a breakthrough in understanding what massive stars do moments before they die. We watched a red supergiant star explode for the first time.
Big stars go crazy.
Red supergiants are the largest stars in the universe in terms of volume, measuring hundreds or sometimes more than a thousand times the radius of the sun. Red supergiants aren't the most massive or bright stars.
Nuclear fusion of elements in the stars' core creates energy. Red supergiants can make more heavy elements than our sun can. Supergiants become hotter and more pressurized as they burn more massive elements. By the time they start fusion, the stars run out of energy, their cores collapse and they blow up into space in a violent type II supernova explosion.
Scientists have observed red supergiants before they go supernova, and they have studied the aftermath, but they have never seen the whole process play out in real time.
The authors of the new study began observing the star in the summer of 2020 when it flickered with bright flashes of radiation that the team later interpreted as gas exploding off of the star's surface. The researchers used two telescopes in Hawaii to watch a cranky star for 130 days. The star boomed at the end of the period.
The team saw evidence of a dense cloud of gas surrounding the star at the time of its explosion, which is likely the same gas that the star ejected during the prior months. The star's core collapsed in the fall of 2020 and this suggests that it started experiencing violent explosions before that.
"We've never confirmed violent activity in a dying red supergiant star where we see it produce such a Luminous emission, then collapse and combust, until now," study co-author Raffaella Margutti, an astronomer at UC Berkeley, said in the statement.
The team concluded that the observations suggest that red supergiants undergo significant changes in their internal structures, resulting in chaotic explosions of gas in their final months before collapsing.
Live Science published the original article.
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