Houston (Lampost.co) — About 11.5 billion years ago, a star estimated to be 530 times more massive than the sun in a violent explosion blew its outer gaseous layers into the surrounding cosmos.
Researchers on Wednesday Nov. 9, 2022 said NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope managed to capture three separate images spanning a period of eight days and a few hours after the explosion.
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Launching The Straits Times, the images were found in a 2010 review of Hubble Observational Archive data. According to astronomer Wenlei Chen, a University of Minnesota postdoctoral researcher and lead author of the study published in the journal Nature.
They offer the first look at a supernova that cooled rapidly after its initial explosion in a series of images and the first in-depth look at a supernova so early in the history of the universe, when it was less than a fifth of its current age.
“The supernova expands and cools, then its color evolves from a warm blue to a cool red,” University of Minnesota astronomy professor and study co-author Patrick Kelly told The Straits Times on Thursday, Nov. 10, 2022. .
The star, called a red supergiant, lives in a dwarf galaxy and explodes at the end of its relatively short life.
“Red supergiants are bright, massive, massive stars, but they are much cooler than most other massive stars, which is why they are red,” said Dr. chen.
The first images, taken about 6 hours after the initial blast, show that the explosion started out relatively small and was very hot – around 99,725 degrees Celsius.
The second picture is about two days later and the third is about 6 days later. In these two images you can see the gas expelled by the star expanding outwards. In the second image, the explosion is only one-fifth hotter than the first. In the third image, the heat is only one-tenth that of the first.
The remnants of an exploding star are likely to grow into very dense objects called neutron stars, Dr. Chen said. A phenomenon called strong gravitational lensing explains how Hubble was able to obtain three images at different times after the explosion.
The immense gravitational force exerted by a cluster of galaxies located in front of the exploding star from Earth’s perspective acts like a lens, bending and magnifying the light from the supernova.
“Gravity in a galaxy cluster not only bends light from behind it, but it also delays the time that light travels because the stronger the gravity, the slower the clocks move,” said Dr. Chen.
Professor Kelly called the ability to see a rapidly cooling supernova in a single set of images thanks to gravitational lensing ‘truly amazing’.
‘It’s like watching a color film reel of a supernova evolve, and it’s a much more detailed picture of every known supernova that existed when the universe was smaller than it is today,’ said Prof. Kelly.
Effran Kurniawan
