A star explodes every second or so somewhere in the universe, but astronomers watched the death of a star called Thrus, live and in real time, a first in the community of scientists.
The team, led by Northwestern University and the University of California, Berkeley, witnessed a dramatic and violent show of the red giant’s self-destruction as it dies and collapses in a Type II supernova.
A Type II supernova, or the so-called classical explosion, is the result of the rapid collapse and explosion of a massive star.
Prior to this historical event, it was believed that the red giants showed no evidence of their soon-to-be eruption, but labors were found emitting bright radiation leading to their last days.
“This suggests that at least some of these stars must undergo significant changes in their internal structure, which then lead to turbulent expulsion of gas before collapsing,” the researchers shared in a press release.
“This is a major advance in our understanding of what massive stars do moments before they die,” Wayne Jacobson Gal Earn, lead author of the study, said in a statement.
“Direct detection of supernova activity in a red giant star has not previously been observed in a normal Type II supernova. For the first time, we watched a red giant star explode.”
“I’m so excited that we’ve discovered new ‘unknown’ things we didn’t know before this discovery.”
Stars classified as red giants have a mass more than 10 times the mass of the Earth’s sun, have a very cold surface of less than 6,920 degrees Fahrenheit and an enormous radius.
The radius of most red giants is between 200 and 800 times that of the Sun.
The bright radiation was detected last summer of 2020 by astronomers at the University of Hawaii’s Institute of Astronomy.
A few months later, in the fall of 2020, a supernova lit up the sky, allowing the team to capture the violent event in real time using the low-resolution imaging spectrometer of the WM Keck Observatory in Monakia, Hawaii, which was also used to image the event in real time.
They were able to capture the powerful and energetic explosion, which the researchers dubbed Supernova 2020 TLF (SN 2020tlf).
“It’s like watching a time bomb go off,” senior study author Raffaella Margotti, an associate professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Berkeley, said in a statement.
“We’ve never seen such violent activity in a dying red giant star that we see it produce such a luminous emission, then collapse and burn, until now.”