Astronomers agree that they are the destruction of white dwarf stars– stars approximately the mass of the sun packed into the size of the Earth. One theory posits that the white dwarf steals matter from a companion star. When the white dwarf gets too heavy, thermonuclear reactions fire up in the core and lead to a runaway surge that ruins the star.
Curtis McCully. Credit: UCSB.
SN 2012Z was an unusual type of thermonuclear surge, in some cases called a Type Iax supernova. Due to the fact that they are less powerful and slower surges, some researchers have theorized that they are failed Type Ia supernovae.
In 2012, the supernova 2012Z was detected in the neighboring spiral galaxy NGC 1309, which had actually been studied in depth and recorded in numerous Hubble images over the years leading up to 2012Z. Hubble images were taken in 2013 in a concerted effort to determine which star in the older images represented the star that had taken off. Analysis of this data in 2014 achieved success– scientists were able to identify the star at the specific position of the supernova 2012Z. This was the first time that the progenitor star of a white dwarf supernova had been identified.
” We were expecting to see one of two things when we got the most current Hubble information,” McCully stated. “Either the star would have entirely disappeared, or perhaps it would have still existed, implying the star we saw in the pre-explosion images wasnt the one that blew up. No one was expecting to see a surviving star that was brighter. That was a genuine puzzle.”.
McCully and the group believe that the half-exploded star got brighter due to the fact that it puffed up to a much bigger state. Paradoxically, for white dwarf stars, the less mass they have, the bigger they are in size.
Andy Howell. Credit: UCSB.
” This star enduring is a little like Obi-Wan Kenobi coming back as a force ghost in Star Wars,” said co-author Andy Howell, accessory teacher at UC Santa Barbara and senior personnel scientist at Las Cumbres Observatory. “Nature attempted to strike this star down, but it came back more effective than we might have thought of.
For years scientists believed that Type Ia supernovae blow up when a white dwarf star reaches a certain limitation in size, called the Chandrasekhar limit, about 1.4 times the mass of the sun. Astronomers were not sure if stars ever got near the Chandrasekhar limitation before blowing up.
” The ramifications for Type Ia supernovae are profound,” says McCully. Now we require to comprehend what makes a supernova stop working and become a Type Iax, and what makes one successful as a Type Ia.”.
Recommendation: “Still Brighter than Pre-explosion, SN 2012Z Did Not Disappear: Comparing Hubble Space Telescope Observations a Decade Apart” by Curtis McCully, Saurabh W. Jha, Richard A. Scalzo, D. Andrew Howell, Ryan J. Foley, Yaotian Zeng, Zheng-Wei Liu, Griffin Hosseinzadeh, Lars Bildsten, Adam G. Riess, Robert P. Kirshner, G. H. Marion and Yssavo Camacho-Neves, 1 February 2022, The Astrophysical Journal.DOI: 10.3847/ 1538-4357/ ac3bbd.
The Hubble Space Telescope captured this dramatic spiral galaxy, cataloged as NGC 1309. Credit: NASA, ESA, The Hubble Heritage Team, (STScI/AURA) and A. Riess (STScI).
A Tenacious Star Validates a Revised Model of Supernovae.
A supernova is the catastrophic explosion of a star. Thermonuclear supernovae, in particular, indicate the total damage of a white dwarf star, leaving absolutely nothing behind. A minimum of thats what astrophysics models and observations suggested.
When a group of astronomers went to analyze the website of the peculiar thermonuclear supernova SN 2012Z with the Hubble Space Telescope, they were stunned to discover that the star had actually endured the surge. Not only had it survived, but the star was actually even brighter after the supernova than it had actually been before. Author Curtis McCully, a postdoctoral scientist at University of California, Santa Barbara and Las Cumbres Observatory, presented these findings at a press conference at the 240th conference of the American Astronomical Society and published them in a post in The Astrophysical Journal. The confusing results supply brand-new info about the origins of a few of the most common, yet strange, surges in the universe.
These thermonuclear supernovae, referred to as Type Ia supernovae, are some of the most crucial tools in astronomers toolkits for measuring cosmic distances. Starting in 1998, observations of these surges revealed that deep space has actually been expanding at an ever-accelerating rate. This is thought to be due to dark energy, the discovery of which won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2011.
When a team of astronomers went to analyze the site of the peculiar thermonuclear supernova SN 2012Z with the Hubble Space Telescope, they were shocked to find that the star had actually survived the surge. Astronomers concur that they are the destruction of white dwarf stars– stars approximately the mass of the sun packed into the size of the Earth. Hubble images were taken in 2013 in a concerted effort to identify which star in the older images corresponded to the star that had actually exploded. “Either the star would have entirely gone away, or perhaps it would have still been there, meaning the star we saw in the pre-explosion images wasnt the one that blew up.” This star enduring is a little like Obi-Wan Kenobi coming back as a force ghost in Star Wars,” stated co-author Andy Howell, accessory professor at UC Santa Barbara and senior personnel scientist at Las Cumbres Observatory.