by - NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope captured a star that exploded and died 11 billion years ago.
- A huge cluster of galaxies deflected the light from this supernova into three reflections.
- The three prints show different colorful stages of the supernova explosion.
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has watched a distant star die, explode and fade in rare detail.
The star died more than 11 billion years ago, when the universe was less than a fifth of its current age of 13.8 billion years, but the light from its violent explosion has only just reached Earth. This is the first time astronomers have closely examined a supernova so early in the universe’s history.
Hubble watched the star collapse, eject its outer layers in a violent explosion, then cool. Based on the brightness of the supernova and how quickly it cooled, scientists estimated that this star was 500 times larger than the sun. The researchers’ work was published in the journal Nature on Wednesday.
Three different reflections of the supernova, spotted by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.
NASA, ESA, STScI, Wenlei Chen (UMN), Patrick Kelly (UMN), Hubble Frontier Fields
“You have the massive star, the core collapses, produces a shock, heats up, and then you watch it cool for a week. I think that’s probably one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen,” Patrick Kelly, who led the study and assistant professor at the University of Minnesota School of Physics and Astronomy, said in a NASA news release.
This is a rare sight, especially this early in the universe, as the explosion and cooling of a supernova occur within just a few hours or days.
The colorful faces of a supernova, warped in space-time
Different Hubble observations of the supernova
NASA, ESA, STScI, Wenlei Chen (UMN), Patrick Kelly (UMN), Hubble Frontier Fields
Hubble spotted this supernova through gravitational lensing. This happens when a cluster of distant galaxies is so massive that it distorts space-time, bending and magnifying light from stars far behind it. This creates mirror images of these stars, which are reflected back to us.
In this case, the gravitational lens produced three images of the same supernova at different points in time. That’s because the light from the explosion took three different paths around the massive galaxy cluster. The paths had different lengths, so the light arrived at different times, reflecting images of three different stages in the star’s death.
That’s why the three reflections are different colors—as the supernova’s temperature changed rapidly over the course of a week, so did its color. In the early, extremely hot phases, the star appeared blue. As it cooled, it appeared redder.
The different colors of the cooling supernova at three different stages of its evolution.
NASA, ESA, STScI, Wenlei Chen (UMN), Patrick Kelly (UMN), Hubble Frontier Fields
“It is very rare that a supernova can be detected at a very early stage, because this stage is very short,” said Wenlei Chen, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Minnesota’s School of Physics and Astronomy who studied this supernova. statement.
“It only lasts from hours to a few days and can be easily missed even for a close detection. In the same exposure, we can see a sequence of images – like many faces of a supernova,” Chen said.
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