Published:
8 one 2022 06:41 GMT
The star that had 10 masses of the Sun changed the understanding of what massive stars do before they die.
For the first time in the history of astronomy, a group of scientists has observed the end of the life of a red supergiant: the rapid self-destruction and agony of the massive star before collapsing into a supernova type II.
Researchers at Northwestern University and the University of California at Berkeley (USA) observed the Sun’s 10-mass star during the last 130 days prior to its explosion.
Located in the galaxy NGC 5731 about 120 million light years from Earth, the encoded star SN 2020tlf it has challenged previous imaginations about how red supergiants behave just before detonation.
They were believed to be relatively quiet before death, with no evidence of violent eruptions or light emissions. The new observations, however, detected bright radiation of the star in his final year.
The University of Hawaii Pan-STARRS Institute for Astronomy first detected the massive star in the summer of 2020 thanks to the enormous amount of light emanating from the red supergiant. A few months later, in the fall of 2020, the supernova lit up the sky.
Artist’s impression of a red supergiant star transitioning into a type II supernova – emitting a violent eruption of radiation and gas before collapsing and exploding. (Courtesy of WM Keck Observatory / Adam Makarenko).
“We have never observed such violent activity in a dying red supergiant star, producing such a luminous emission before collapsing and go into combustion“, says Raffaella Margutti, co-author of the study published en The Astrophysical Journal.
Such activity suggests that at least some of these stars must undergo significant changes in their internal structure, which then lead to the tumultuous expulsion of gas, moments before its collapse.
The lead author of the research, Wynn Jacobson-Galán, commented that it is “a breakthrough in understanding of what massive stars do moments before they die. “