2024-01-11 02:20:00
A team of astronomers managed to confirm, with the help of Very Large Telescope (VLT) and the New Technology Telescope (NTT) del European Southern Observatory (ESO), the existence of a link between supernovae and the formation of black holes and neutron stars.
The idea that there was a relationship between the explosion that certain stars suffer at the end of their lives and the other two phenomena was not new, but Until now it might not be proven by direct evidence.
“In our work, we establish a direct link,” he said, in a statement released by ESO, Ping Chen, researcher at the Weizmann Institute of Science (Israel) and lead author of a study published this Wednesday in the journal Natureand presented at the 243rd meeting of the American Astronomical Society in New Orleans (United States).
It all started in May 2022, when the South African amateur astronomer Berto Monard discovered the supernova SN 2022jli in the spiral arm of the nearby galaxy NGC 157, located 75 million light years away. Two different teams focused their attention on the followingmath of this explosion and discovered that it had unique behavior.
After the explosion, the brightness of most supernovae simply fades over time. The behavior of SN 2022jli, on the other hand, was very peculiar, since as the general brightness decreased, it did not do so gradually, but rather oscillated up and down in periods of regarding 12 days.
“This is the first time that repeated periodic oscillations over many cycles have been detected in a supernova light curve,” he explained. Thomas Moorea doctoral student at Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland, who led a study of the supernova published late last year in the Astrophysical Journal.
Both Moore’s and Chen’s teams believe that the presence of more than one star in the SN 2022jli system might explain this behavior.
In fact, it is not unusual for massive stars to form, together with a companion star, what is known as a binary systemand the star that caused SN 2022jli has been no exception.
The notable thing regarding this system is that The fellow star appears to have survived the violent death of his partner and the two bodies, the compact remnant and the companion, They probably kept orbiting each other..
“ENERGY THEFT”
The data collected by Moore’s team, which included observations with ESO’s NTT telescope, located in the Atacama Desert, in Chiledid not allow them to pinpoint exactly how the interaction between the two objects caused the ups and downs in the light curve.
Chen’s team had additional observations: They found the same regular fluctuations in the system’s visible brightness that Moore’s team had detected, and they also detected periodic motions of hydrogen and gamma-ray bursts in the system.
Joining all the tracksthe two teams generally agree that when the companion star interacted with material emitted during the supernova explosion, its hydrogen-rich atmosphere swelled more than usual.
As the compact object left following the explosion crossed the companion’s atmosphere, it stripped hydrogen from the star, forming a hot disk of matter around it.
Although the teams were unable to observe the light coming from the compact object itself, they concluded that this energy theft can only be due to an invisible neutron star, or possibly a black hole, that absorbs matter from the companion star’s swollen atmosphere.
With the confirmed presence of a black hole or neutron star, there is still much to unravel regarding this enigmatic system, including the exact nature of the compact object or what end might await this binary system.
Next-generation telescopes, such as ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope, scheduled to begin operations later this decade, will help unravel these mysteries.
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