The core of a giant star some 21 billion light years away ran out of fuel and collapsed in on itself before bursting outwards in a strong supernova. Astronomers could determine the characteristics of the initial star thanks to photographs that NASA Hubble Space Telescope took when it discovered the explosion less than six hours later, the earliest we have ever observed such a distant supernova.
Wenlei Chen of the University of Minnesota and his colleagues discovered this supernova When looking through archived Hubble data from 2010. It could be seen because of a process known as gravitational lensing, in which the gravity of a large object, in this case, a galaxy in the neighboring cluster Abell 370, magnifies the light coming from behind it.
Researchers published their study in the journal Nature.
NASA and SpaceX are conducting a six-month feasibility study to assess whether a Dragon mission could safely boost the orbit of the Hubble Space Telescope and, perhaps, otherwise, service.
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Space.com said Chen and his colleagues concluded that the initial star that had gone supernova was probably a red supergiant with a diameter of around 530 times that of the sun by entering Hubble data into models and examining features in the photographs like brightness and hue.
Additionally, they found that the first image in the trio was captured by Hubble just six hours after the core explosion, while it captured the second and third between 10 and 30 days later, respectively.
The astronomers determined the supernova's age to be roughly 11.5 billion years old, making it one of the oldest and most distant supernovas we've ever seen. The supernova has high redshift, meaning that the wavelengths of light are stretched and shifted towards the red side of the spectrum as a result of the expansion of the Universe.
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The study of the supernova explosions of these red supergiant stars is consistent with our current understanding of how heavier atomic elements were formed both inside stars and during supernova explosions.
As the gas in the supernova expands and cools, a change in color is released. The light emitted tends to be bluer when the temperature is greater and red when the temperature is lower. So, the green and red photographs correspond to 2 and 8 days, respectively, after the explosion, whereas the blue image represents a snapshot of the supernova taken a few hours after the stellar explosion.
According to ScienceDaily, the next generation of gas and material from which solar systems and life as we know it are produced is made up of elements forged inside stars and released during these supernova explosions.
The gas in today's galaxies would only include the hydrogen and helium created at the Big Bang. It would not be able to support complex life, which needs additional heavier chemical components. Additionally, the fact that this explosion was seen through a gravitational lens shows that an event occurring in the far reaches of the Universe may be seen several times means that, in theory, we could concentrate our equipment in advance to gain a close-up look of a star exploding into a supernova.
"Core-collapse supernovae mark the death of massive stars, which are short-lived because they burn up quickly compared to stars with less mass," Chen said per New Scientist. "Thus, the rate of core-collapse supernovae should track the formation rate of massive stars," he added.
This suggests that we can learn more about how star creation functioned in the early cosmos by examining supernovae like this. According to Chen, the James Webb Space Telescope will be a potent instrument in this hunt because of its capacity to probe far into the early cosmos.
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