It is another first for astronomy.
Astronomers have imaged a red supergiant star in real-time for the first time. They watched as the star convulsed and exploded.
They 888-492-0 888-492-0 888-492-0's observations contradict previous thinking about how red supergiants behave before they blow up.
The Pan-STARRS observatory on Haleakala, Maui, and the W. M. Keck observatory on Hawaii Island are two of the telescopes that the team of astrologers watched. The observations were part of a survey. The final 130 days leading up to the detonation of a supernova were watched by them.
For the first time, we saw a red supergiant star explode.
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Wynn Jacobson-Galn is from UC Berkeley.
The paper is titled "Final moments". Precursor Emission, Envelope Inflation, and Enhanced Mass Loss precede the Luminous Type II Supernova 2020. The lead author of the paper is a graduate research fellow at UC Berkeley.
This is a breakthrough in our understanding of what stars do before they die. Pre-super nova activity in a red supergiant star has never been observed before in an ordinary type II supernova. We watched a red supergiant star explode.
It is like watching a time-bomb.
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UC Berkeley has a Raffaella Margutti.
The summer of 2020 is when the discovery was made. The progenitor star had a dramatic rise in luminosity. The star exploded when Fall came around. A type II supernova is a star collapsing and then exploding.
The artist's rendition of the red supergiant star is a violent eruption of radiation and gas on its dying breath before collapsing and exploding. The W. M. Keck Observatory is in the vicinity of Adam Makarenko.
The first spectrum of the supernova was captured by the LRIS. The data showed the circumstellar material around the exploded star. The material was seen by Pan-STARRS before the star exploded.
Senior author Raffaella Margutti said that Keck was instrumental in providing evidence of a massive star transitioning into a supernova explosion. It is like watching a bomb go off. We have never confirmed violent activity in a dying red supergiant star where we see it produce a bright emission, then collapse and explode.
The figure shows the pre- and post-explosion. The top panel shows the total of all the radiation that was emitted by the event. The middle and bottom panels show the black-body temperatures in red and blue, respectively. The image is from the book, Jacobson-Galn et al.
The team turned to other instruments after the explosion. The progenitor star was 10 times more massive than the Sun, according to data from the DEep and NIRES. The star is in a distant universe.
The team's observations led to new knowledge about the progenitor stars of the Type II supernovae. Prior to these observations, nobody had seen a red supergiant display such a spike in luminosity. They were much less aggressive in their final days.
The material was ejected prior to the collapse. The material ejection takes longer than 2020. It's a bit of a puzzle that this supernova emitted circumstellar material for 130 days before collapsing. The bright flash before the star's explosion is related to the ejected CSM, but the team of researchers isn't sure how they all interacted.
A type II supernova explosion involves the destruction of a massive supergiant star. The credit is given to the ESO.
The variability in the star is puzzling. The burst of light coming from the star suggests that something is not right in its internal structure. Changes result in a huge ejection of gas before the star collapses and explodes.
The authors discuss what may have caused the gas to be ejected. Waves drive mass loss in the late stages of stellar evolution. They write that it happens when the final years before the sun can allow for the injection of energy into the outer stellar layers, results in an inflated envelope and/or eruptive mass-loss episodes. Current wave-driven models don't match the progenitor star's ejection of gas They are consistent with the progenitor star's last 130 days, but not with the burst of luminosity.
The authors summed up their paper succinctly. It is likely that the progenitor mass range derived from the nebular spectrum is the result of instabilities deep in the stellar interior, most likely associated with the final nuclear burning stages. The progenitor could have ejected stellar material that was then detected in the pre-explosion flux and the early-time SN spectrum, if energy deposition from either gravitational waves generated in neon/oxygen burning stages or a Silicon flash in the final?130 days of the progenitor was included.
There must be more than one supernova that behaves like this. The team has found a way to find more of them in the future. If the survey finds more stars like this one, they will keep an eye on it to see if it collapses and explodes.
The new unknowns that have been unlocked by this discovery are exciting to me. The discovery of more events like SN 2020tlf will impact how we define the final months of stellar evolution, unifying observers and theorists in the quest to solve the mystery of how massive stars spend the final moments of their lives.
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W. V. Jacobson-Galn and her co-authors were cited in the article. There is a link to this on the website: https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/ac3f3a.
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