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This NASA image shows a neutron star (center) in the constellation Taurus that remained after the original star’s explosion.
© AP
Astronomers have seen the most massive stellar explosion ever recorded.
The Supernova with catalog number SN2016aps was approximately ten times more energetic than conventional events of this type and shone about 500 times brighter, as reported by the team led by Matt Nicholl of the University of Birmingham in the journal “Nature Astronomy”.
“SN2016aps is spectacular in several ways,” said co-author Edo Berger of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “Not only is it brighter than any other supernova we’ve seen so far, it has some properties and characteristics that make it seem weird compared to other stellar explosions in the universe.”
Incredibly brilliant
For example, supernovae normally only emit about one percent of their energy in visible light. SN2016aps, on the other hand, not only had a record energy of around 200 trillion gigatons of TNT (that’s a 2 with 26 zeros), but it radiated about half, making it glow about 500 times brighter than a supernova ordinary.
Two giant stars
Astronomers assume that the exploded star was previously formed from the fusion of two large suns. This is supported by the unusually high proportion of hydrogen in the explosion cloud. Hydrogen is the element that aging giant suns generally lose before they finally explode as a supernova. However, the smaller a star is, the longer it can hold its hydrogen. “The fact that SN2016aps maintained its hydrogen led us to the theory that two less massive stars merged,” explains Berger. The resulting star still had a lot of hydrogen on the one hand, but on the other hand it was already large enough to trigger the supernova.
“How to pour oil on the fire”
Follow-up observations also provided a possible explanation for the extraordinary brightness of the star’s explosion: “We have found that in the past few years before the explosion, the star released a massive envelope of gas while pulsing violently,” Nicholl said. “The collision of the explosion cloud with this huge gas envelope led to the supernova’s incredible brilliance. It was basically like pouring oil onto the fire.”
The researchers now hope to use new instruments like the Vera C. Rubin observatory under construction to track other supernovae, especially from the first billion years of the universe among the first stars.
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