NASA | Ames Research Center | Kepler | 2018 Nov 30
In a galaxy far away, an old star exploded and became a supernova. About 170 million years later on Feb. 4, 2018, the light emanating from the explosion was received by an arsenal of high-powered telescopes.
NASA’s Kepler space telescope detected the unfurling light of SN 2018oh, as it has been labeled. The first ground-based facility to identify the signal was with the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernova and soon observatories around the globe were monitoring the supernova as part of a unique scientific experiment designed to help solve the mystery of how stars explode.
NASA retired the Kepler space telescope on October 30, following the exhaustion of fuel supplies after nine and a half years of ground-breaking operations. But from December to May, while there was still fuel left, the Kepler team oriented the spacecraft toward two distinct patches of sky that were simultaneously observable from Earth by ground-based observatories. The telescopes were able to view both patches of sky teeming with galaxies. Each of these thousands of galaxies has billions of stars.
While the telescopes watched, a few of those stars ended their long lives in dramatic explosions. With its unique capabilities, Kepler observed the minute changes in brightness of these explosions from their very beginnings while the ground-based telescopes tracked changes in color and the atomic composition of these dying stars.
With the combined data from these telescopes, astronomers achieved what they had hoped for — an unprecedented observation of the onset of a supernova. ...
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Newly Discovered Supernova Complicates Origin Story Theories
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Kepler Captures Extraordinary Observations of a Star's Death Throes
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Institute for Astronomy | University of Hawaii | 2018 Nov 30
No Stripped Companion Material in the Nebular Spectrum of the "Two-Component"
Type Ia Supernova ASASSN-18bt ~ M. A. Tucker, B. J. Shappee, J. P. Wisniewski
- arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1811.09635 > 23 Nov 2018
Light Curve for a Type Ia Supernova ~ G. Dimitriadis et al
- arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1811.10061 > 25 Nov 2018
with Early Excess Emission from the Kepler 2 Observations ~ W. Li et al
- arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1811.10056 > 25 Nov 2018