Gemini Observatory | 2019 Aug 15
A renegade star exploding in a distant galaxy has forced astronomers to set aside decades of research and focus on a new breed of supernova that can utterly annihilate its parent star — leaving no remnant behind. The signature event, something astronomers had never witnessed before, may represent the way in which the most massive stars in the Universe, including the first stars, die.Artist’s concept of the SN 2016iet pair-instability supernova.
Credit: Gemini Observatory/NSF/AURA/Joy Pollard
The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Gaia satellite first noticed the supernova, known as SN 2016iet, on November 14, 2016. Three years of intensive follow-up observations with a variety of telescopes, including the Gemini North telescope and its Multi-Object Spectrograph on Maunakea in Hawaiʻi, the CfA | Harvard & Smithsonian's MMT Observatory located at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory in Amado, AZ, and the Magellan Telescopes at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile, provided crucial perspectives on the object’s distance and composition. ...
SN 2016iet has a multitude of oddities, including its incredibly long duration, large energy, unusual chemical fingerprints, and environment poor in heavier elements — for which no obvious analogues exist in the astronomical literature. ...
Explosion of a Monster Star Requiring New Supernova Mechanism
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics | 2019 Aug 15
SN 2016iet: The Pulsational or Pair Instability Explosion of a Low Metallicity Massive
CO Core Embedded in a Dense Hydrogen-Poor Circumstellar Medium ~ Sebastian Gomez et al
- Astrophysical Journal 881(2):87 (2019 Aug 20) DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/ab2f92
- arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1904.07259 > 15 Apr 2019