NASA | Ames Research Center | Kepler | 2016 Mar 21
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLlILnQjGfc[/youtube][c]The brilliant flash of an exploding star’s shockwave—what astronomers call the “shockThe brilliant flash of an exploding star’s shockwave—what astronomers call the “shock breakout”—has been captured for the first time in the optical wavelength or visible light by NASA's planet-hunter, the Kepler space telescope.
breakout” -- is illustrated in this video animation. The cartoon video begins with a view
of a red supergiant star that is 500 hundred times bigger and 20,000 brighter than our
sun. When the star’s internal furnace can no longer sustain nuclear fusion its core to
collapses under gravity. A shockwave from the implosion rushes upward through the
star’s layers. The shockwave initially breaks through the star’s visible surface as a
series of finger-like plasma jets. Only 20 minute later the full fury of the shockwave
reaches the surface and the doomed star blasts apart as a supernova explosion. This
animation is based on photometric observations made by NASA’s Kepler space telescope.
By closely monitoring the star KSN 2011d, located 1.2 billion light-years away, Kepler
caught the onset of the early flash and subsequent explosion.
Credits: Credit: NASA Ames, STScI/G. Bacon[/c][hr][/hr]
An international science team led by Peter Garnavich, an astrophysics professor at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, analyzed light captured by Kepler every 30 minutes over a three-year period from 500 distant galaxies, searching some 50 trillion stars. They were hunting for signs of massive stellar death explosions known as supernovae.
In 2011, two of these massive stars, called red supergiants, exploded while in Kepler’s view. The first behemoth, KSN 2011a, is nearly 300 times the size of our sun and a mere 700 million light years from Earth. The second, KSN 2011d, is roughly 500 times the size of our sun and around 1.2 billion light years away.
“To put their size into perspective, Earth's orbit about our sun would fit comfortably within these colossal stars,” said Garnavich.
Whether it’s a plane crash, car wreck or supernova, capturing images of sudden, catastrophic events is extremely difficult but tremendously helpful in understanding root cause. Just as widespread deployment of mobile cameras has made forensic videos more common, the steady gaze of Kepler allowed astronomers to see, at last, a supernova shockwave as it reached the surface of a star. The shock breakout itself lasts only about 20 minutes, so catching the flash of energy is an investigative milestone for astronomers. ...
Astronomers Glimpse Supernova Shockwave
Australian National University | 2016 Mar 21
Shock Breakout and Early Light Curves of Type II-P Supernovae Observed with Kepler - P. M. Garnavich et al
- Astrophysical Journal 820(1):23 (2016 Mar 20) DOI: 10.3847/0004-637X/820/1/23
arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1603.05657 > 17 Mar 2016