date of publication:
January 07 2022 13:07 GMT
Update date: 07 Jan 2022 15:55 GMT
An American research team achieved a historical precedent in astronomy, after they succeeded in depicting the dramatic end of the life of a red giant star, during the last 130 days before its fatal explosion.
This star is about 120 million light-years away from Earth, according to the Sia Tech Daily website.
The astronomers from Northwestern and California-Berkeley Universities are the first ever to witness the rapid self-destruction of a red star 10 times the sun, and document its final death throes before collapsing into another supernova.
What has been documented poses a challenge to previous theories regarding the behavior of the period before the explosion of red giant stars.
It was common for these planets to be relatively calm before their death, and characterized by no evidence of violent volcanic eruptions or luminous emissions.
But what was documented in the death of the giant red star called “Supernova SN 2020tlf”, showed a contradiction to what was common.
The new observations revealed bright radiation from the red giant star, which continued throughout the last year before it exploded.
This suggests that some of these stars undergo significant changes in their internal structure, resulting in turbulent gas expulsion moments before collapsing.
The report quotes Wayne Jacobson Gallan, the principal supervisor of the study that took place at the Northwestern Center and was published yesterday in the Astrophysical Journal, as saying: “What was discovered is a breakthrough for the mainstream in astronomy about what massive stars do moments before her death. For the first time, we have seen a red giant star explode following previously unrecorded violent activity.”
The University of Hawaii’s Institute of Astronomy had discovered the doomed supernova for the first time in the summer of 2020 through a huge amount of light emitted from it.
And after several months, specifically in the fall of 2020, from this giant red star, beams of light ignited space.
The report shows how the research team quickly captured the powerful flash, and obtained the first spectrum of the active explosion, using the imaging spectrometer of the Keck Observatory in Hawaii.
The data showed direct evidence of a dense continuum surrounding the star at the time of the explosion, likely the same gas that was documented earlier this summer, according to the report.
“It was like watching a time bomb,” says Raffaella Margotti, associate professor of the astronomical team. “We’ve never seen anything like that before. It was violent activity in a dying red giant star, as we watched it produce a light emission, then collapse and ignite.”
The report quotes team leader Gallan as saying: “I am very excited about this unknown that has been revealed…More of this kind of achievement will greatly affect how we define the last months of the evolution of the lives of massive stars, and decipher the great mystery of how they spent the last moments of their lives.” .
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