Researchers caught a rare Wolf-Rayet star self-destructing; these stars are 20 times as massive as out own Sun and five times as hot.
For the first time researchers have confirmed that a Wolf-Rayet died a violent death in an explosion called a Type IIb supernova, a DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory news release reported.
"Newly developed observational capabilities now enable us to study exploding stars in ways we could only dream of before. We are moving towards real-time studies of supernovae," Gal-Yam, an astrophysicist in the Weizmann Institute's Department of Particle Physics and Astrophysics, said in the news release.
The used both ground and space-based telescopes to make their findings.
"This is the smoking gun. For the first time, we can directly point to an observation and say that this type of Wolf-Rayet star leads to this kind of Type IIb supernova," Peter Nugent, head of Berkeley Lab's Computational Cosmology Center (C3) and leads the Berkeley contingent of the iPTF collaboration, said in the news release.
"When I identified the first example of a Type IIb supernova in 1987, I dreamed that someday we would have direct evidence of what kind of star exploded. It's refreshing that we can now say that Wolf-Rayet stars are responsible, at least in some cases," Alex Filippenko, Professor of Astronomy at UC Berkeley. Both Filippenko and Nugent are also co-authors on the Nature paper said in the news release.
When these stars explode they are believed to send heavy chemical elements into the surrounding universe; these could be "the building blocks of life."
Supernovas have to be captured quickly solar winds swept the material awat; the researchers managed to do just that.
"With a series of observations, including data I took with the Keck-I telescope 6.5 days after the explosion, we could see that the supernova's expanding debris quickly overtook the flash-ionized wind that had revealed the Wolf-Rayet features. So, catching the supernova sufficiently early is hard-you've got to be on the ball, as our team was," Filippenko said.
