For the first time ever, astronomers have witnessed a massive star erupt in a spectacular explosion. Even more stunning than the scientists had anticipated, the event was.
According to a recent study that appeared in the Astrophysical Journal on January 6, observers began observing SN 2020tlf, a red supergiant that is 120 million light-years from Earth, more than 100 days prior to its most recent, catastrophic collapse. The star burst into dazzling bursts of light at that time, and enormous balls of gas flew out from its surface.
A Type II supernova develops from a red supergiant star. It collapses and bursts with a strong blast of radiation and gas on its final breath. (W. M. Keck Observatory photo by Adam Makarenko)
Because they had previously not observed any violent emissions from red supergiants that were poised to erupt, scientists were taken aback by these pre-supernova pyrotechnics.
Wynn Jacobson-Galán, a research scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, who is the primary study author, stated in a statement, “This is a breakthrough in our understanding of what huge stars do moments before they die.” “We witnessed a red supergiant star burst for the first time!”
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Red supergiants are the biggest stars in the universe in terms of volume. They are hundreds or even thousands of times the size of the sun. (Red supergiants are not the brightest or biggest stars in the universe, even though they are big.)
Atoms in the cores of these huge stars fuse together to make energy, just like our sun does. On the other hand, red supergiants can make things that are much heavier than the hydrogen and helium that our sun burns. As supergiants burn heavier elements, their cores get hotter and more compact. When these stars start fusing iron and nickel, their cores collapse, and they send their gassy outer atmospheres into space in a type II supernova explosion, they run out of energy.
Scientists have seen red supergiants before they go supernova and studied what happens after these cosmic explosions, but until now, they had never seen the whole thing happen in real time.
The new study’s authors first began observing SN 2020tlf in the summer of 2020, when the star began to emit strong radiation bursts that they later determined were the result of gas erupting from the star’s surface. For 130 days, the furious star was monitored by the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy Pan-STARRS1 telescope and the W. M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. The star finally blew out at the conclusion of that period of time.
Researchers found evidence that a dense cloud of gas was surrounding the star at the time of its explosion. This cloud of gas was probably the same gas that the star had been giving off in the months before its explosion. This shows that huge explosions started long before the core of the star broke apart in the fall of 2020.
“We’ve never confirmed such violent activity in a dying red supergiant star where we see it produce such a luminous emission, then collapse and combust, until now,” study co-author Raffaella Margutti, an astrophysicist at UC Berkeley, said in the statement.
According to what the team found, red supergiants’ inner structures change a lot, leading to chaotic gas explosions in their last few months before they crash.
