New research gives astronomers a better understanding of a certain kind of mysterious, quickly fading supernova.
While most exploding stars flare brightly and then slowly fade over weeks to months, an unusual group of supernovas noticed only in the last 10 years flare up and disappear within days.
“This is a new way for massive stars to die and distribute material back into space.”
Now, thanks to the ability of NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope to precisely measure starlight over long periods of time, astronomers now have a pretty good idea what these flash-in-the-pan supernovas are: exploding stars probably too dim to be detectable until the stellar matter ejected during the explosion collides with a shell of material puffed off years earlier by the star.
The collision generates a shock wave that heats up the shell of gas, but then rapidly fades. While supernovas continue to glow because of the radioactive material generated in the explosion, these shocked clouds contain little radioactive material and have no residual glow.
Finding FELTs
This interpretation for what have been called fast-evolving luminous transients, or FELTs, comes from models that University of California, Berkeley astrophysicists created, which match closely the observed light from a recently recorded supernova dubbed KSN2015K.
“The fact that Kepler completely captured the rapid evolution of this supernova really constrains the exotic ways in which stars die. The wealth of data allowed us to disentangle the physical properties of the phantom blast, such as how much material the star expelled at the end of its life and the hypersonic speed of the explosion,” says graduate student David Khatami.
“This is the first time that we can test FELT models to a high degree of accuracy and really connect theory to observations.”
Though researchers need to observe other FELTs to confirm this conclusion, the unusually rapid rise and fall in brightness appears to be a signature of stars that belch out shells of matter in mini-eruptions before exploding entirely.
Kepler’s contribution
The Kepler telescope hunts for planets in our galaxy, the Milky Way, by detecting faint changes in a star’s brightness over months and years as a planet moved across its face.
This sensitivity enabled detection of KSN2015K and the faint changes in brightness over a little more than a week in February 2016, though it wasn’t discovered in the Kepler data until two years later. It occurred in the spiral arm of a galaxy 1.3 billion light years from Earth, which means that the light has been traveling towards us for one-tenth the age of the universe.
Amateur gets first look at supernova ‘shock breakout’
The star appears to have exploded 2.2 days before the peak brightness, which means that the star shed an envelope of gas about a year earlier. The brightness then faded to half the peak over about eight days. The peak was about one-tenth the duration of a typical Type Ia supernova, which are the standard candle for measuring distance in the universe.
Since only a few FELTs have actually been observed, a variety of theories have emerged to explain them: the afterglow of a gamma-ray burst, a supernova boosted by a magnetar (neutron star with a powerful magnetic field), or a failed Type Ia supernova.
Khatami tried several scenarios to explain the rise and fall in brightness, such as the explosion of a white dwarf star, or a binary merger followed by a supernova, but none could reproduce the observations except the collision of ejecta with an envelope of gas shed earlier by the star.
“We collected an awesome light curve,” says Armin Rest of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. “We were able to constrain the mechanism and the properties of the blast. We could exclude alternate theories and arrive at the dense-shell model explanation. This is a new way for massive stars to die and distribute material back into space.
Death-defying supernova kept exploding over 50 years
The researchers report their findings in the journal Nature Astronomy.
Source: UC Berkeley
