[ad_1]
A giant stellar explosion has been recorded in a galaxy some 3.6 billion light years from Earth, making it the brightest supernova ever seen so far. In fact, it was discovered in 2016, but researchers had to follow the event for two years before jotting down the final results of the research, which has just been released.
According to Matt Nicholl, lead author of the article published in Nature Astronomy, the radiation from the object was five times greater than the energy from the explosion of a normal-sized supernova. “This is the largest light we have ever seen from a supernova,” he said. It is so extreme that Nicholl and his colleagues think it may even be a supernova made up of two large stars that merged before the explosion.
In fact, the amount of energy emitted by this supernova, in just a few years, is equal to six times the total amount of energy that our Sun will emit throughout its life, estimated at seven billion years. Something really special must have happened there, and that’s what the researchers tried to discover.
The object was named SN2016aps and, since its discovery, its brightness has decreased by only 1% of its peak. The team’s observations through the Hubble telescope and many other ground equipment allowed researchers to determine some characteristics of the explosion and how it could have happened. For example, they calculated that, at its peak, it had the equivalent of 100 billion times the energy of the Sun.
Among these conclusions, the team notes that some of the brightness was likely derived from the interaction between the supernova and a layer of gas around it. These layers are released when the star is about to explode and emit violent pulses. If the explosion occurs at the right time, it can hit that layer of gas, collide with it, and release a tremendous amount of energy. The team believes that SN2016aps is one of the most likely candidates ever encountered for this already observed process.
Furthermore, the SN2016aps is highly massive. The researchers calculated something between 50 and 100 times the mass of the Sun – this is one of the signs that the supernova may have originated from a star system, not just a single star. There are other indications, such as the primary gas found: hydrogen. “Such a large star would normally have lost all of its hydrogen through stellar winds long before it began to pulse,” said Nicholl.
One explanation for finding the gas in the object is that two stars with a mass slightly smaller than the SN2016aps merged before the explosion. Lower mass stars retain their hydrogen longer, while their combined masses become high enough to consequently cause the supernova explosion.
Now that astronomers know that explosions as impressive as this happen in the cosmos, NASA’s new James Webb Space Telescope could be used to search for similar events. Plus, you’ll be able to see incredible supernovae so far away that it will be possible to observe the “deaths” of the first stars in the universe, according to study co-author Edo Berger. However, this space telescope has suffered several delays in its development schedule, and the most recent information on its launch was that it is not yet forecast when this will finally occur.
Source: Space.com, Bad Astronomy
[ad_2]
