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Explosive star death witnessed by Hubble could help develop an early warning system - CNN

Explosive star death witnessed by Hubble could help develop an early warning system - CNN

Explosive star death witnessed by Hubble could help develop an early warning system - CNN
Oct 21, 2021 1 min, 34 secs

"We used to talk about supernova work like we were crime scene investigators, where we would show up after the fact and try to figure out what happened to that star," said Ryan Foley, leader of the discovery team and assistant professor in the University of California, Santa Cruz, astronomy and astrophysics department, in a statement."This is a different situation, because we really know what's going on and we actually see the death in real time."

The supernova, called SN 2020fqv, is located in the interacting Butterfly Galaxies, which can be found in the Virgo constellation.

The aging star released this material in the final year before its death, allowing astronomers a glimpse into what happened prior to the supernova.

"We rarely get to examine this very close-in circumstellar material since it is only visible for a very short time, and we usually don't start observing a supernova until at least a few days after the explosion," said lead study author Samaporn Tinyanont, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in a statement.

"For this supernova, we were able to make ultra-rapid observations with Hubble, giving unprecedented coverage of the region right next to the star that exploded."

A study detailing these findings will soon be published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Invaluable data may help find other supernovas

To understand more about the history of the star, the research team used previous Hubble observations of the astronomical object over the last few decades.

"Now we have this whole story about what's happening to the star in the years before it died, through the time of death, and then the aftermath of that," Foley said.

As we find more and more of these supernovas with this sort of excellent data set, we'll be able to understand better what's happening in the last few years of a star's life."

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