The bright supernova (at tick marks) in the galaxy NGC 4666 photographed on December 24, 2014. Credit: Gregor Krannich
A 14th magnitude supernova discovered in the spiral galaxy NGC 4666 earlier this month has recently brightened to 11th magnitude, making it not only the second brightest supernova of the year, but an easy find in an 8-inch or larger telescope. I made a special trip into the cold this morning for a look and saw it with ease in my 10-inch (25-cm) scope at low power at magnitude 11.9.
Before the Moon taints the dawn sky, you may want to bundle up and have a look, too. The charts below will help you get there.
NGC 4666 is also known as the Superwind Galaxy. Home to vigorous star formation, a combination of supernova explosions and strong winds from massive stars in the starburst region drives a vast outflow of gas from the galaxy into space, called a “superwind”. Credit: ESO/J. Dietrich
With the temporary name ASASSN-14lp, this Type Ia supernova was snatched up by the catchy-titled “Assassin Project”, short for Automated Sky Survey for SuperNovae (ASAS-SN)on December 9th. Only 80 million light years from Earth, NGC 4666 is a relatively nearby spiral galaxy famous enough to earn a nickname.
Hot, X-ray emitting gas in NGC 4666 billows around the main galaxy as a superwind seen here as outflows on either side of the optical image. Photo taken with the XMM-Newton telescope. Credit: M. Ehle and ESO
Called the Superwind Galaxy, it’s home to waves of intense star formation thought to be caused by gravitational interactions between it and its neighboring galaxies, including NGC 4668, visible in the lower left corner of the photo above.
Supernovae also play a part in powering the wind which emerges from the galaxy’s central regions like pseudopods on an amoeba. X-ray and radio light show the outflows best. How fitting that a bright supernova should happen to appear at this time. Seeing one of the key players behind the superwind with our own eyes gives us a visceral feel for the nature of its home galaxy.
“Big picture” map showing the location of the galaxy NGC 4666 in Virgo not far from Porrima. The view faces south shortly before the start of dawn in early January. Source: Stellarium
Spectra taken of ASASSN-14lp show it to be a Type Ia object involving the explosive burning of a white dwarf star in a binary system. The Earth-size dwarf packs the gravitational might of a sun-size star and pulls hydrogen gas from the nearby companion down to its surface. Slowly, the dwarf gets heavier and more massive.
When it attains a mass 1.4 times that of the sun, it can no longer support itself. The star suddenly collapses, heats to incredible temperatures and burns up explosively in a runaway fusion reaction. Bang! A supernova.
Detailed map with stars to about magnitude 10. The galaxy is just a little more than a degree northeast of Porrima (Gamma Virginis). Source: Stellarium
Here are a couple maps to help you find the new object. Fortunately, it’s high in the sky just before the start of dawn in the “Y” of Virgo only a degree or so from the 3rd magnitude double star Porrima, also known as Gamma Virginis. Have at it and let us know if you spot the latest superwind-maker.
For more photos and magnitude updates, check out Dave Bishop’s page on the supernova. You can also print a chart with comparison magnitudes by clicking over to the AAVSOand typing in ASASSN-14lp in the “name” box.
This Chandra image of the Tycho supernova remnant contains new evidence for what triggered the original supernova explosion. Credit: NASA/CXC/Chinese Academy of Sciences/F. Lu et al.
At one time or another, all science enthusiasts have heard the late Carl Sagan’s infamous words: “We are made of star stuff.” But what does that mean exactly? How could colossal balls of plasma, greedily burning away their nuclear fuel in faraway time and space, play any part in spawning the vast complexity of our Earthly world? How is it that “the nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies” could have been forged so offhandedly deep in the hearts of these massive stellar giants?
Unsurprisingly, the story is both elegant and profoundly awe-inspiring.
All stars come from humble beginnings: namely, a gigantic, rotating clump of gas and dust. Gravity drives the cloud to condense as it spins, swirling into an ever more tightly packed sphere of material. Eventually, the star-to-be becomes so dense and hot that molecules of hydrogen in its core collide and fuse into new molecules of helium. These nuclear reactions release powerful bursts of energy in the form of light. The gas shines brightly; a star is born.
The ultimate fate of our fledgling star depends on its mass. Smaller, lightweight stars burn though the hydrogen in their core more slowly than heavier stars, shining somewhat more dimly but living far longer lives. Over time, however, falling hydrogen levels at the center of the star cause fewer hydrogen fusion reactions; fewer hydrogen fusion reactions mean less energy, and therefore less outward pressure.
At a certain point, the star can no longer maintain the tension its core had been sustaining against the mass of its outer layers. Gravity tips the scale, and the outer layers begin to tumble inward on the core. But their collapse heats things up, increasing the core pressure and reversing the process once again. A new hydrogen burning shell is created just outside the core, reestablishing a buffer against the gravity of the star’s surface layers.
While the core continues conducting lower-energy helium fusion reactions, the force of the new hydrogen burning shell pushes on the star’s exterior, causing the outer layers to swell more and more. The star expands and cools into a red giant. Its outer layers will ultimately escape the pull of gravity altogether, floating off into space and leaving behind a small, dead core – a white dwarf.
Lower-mass stars like our sun eventually enter a swollen, red giant phase. Ultimately, its outer layers will be thrown off altogether, leaving nothing but a small white dwarf star. Image Credit: ESO/S. Steinhofel
Heavier stars also occasionally falter in the fight between pressure and gravity, creating new shells of atoms to fuse in the process; however, unlike smaller stars, their excess mass allows them to keep forming these layers. The result is a series of concentric spheres, each shell containing heavier elements than the one surrounding it. Hydrogen in the core gives rise to helium. Helium atoms fuse together to form carbon. Carbon combines with helium to create oxygen, which fuses into neon, then magnesium, then silicon… all the way across the periodic table to iron, where the chain ends. Such massive stars act like a furnace, driving these reactions by way of sheer available energy.
But this energy is a finite resource. Once the star’s core becomes a solid ball of iron, it can no longer fuse elements to create energy. As was the case for smaller stars, fewer energetic reactions in the core of heavyweight stars mean less outward pressure against the force of gravity. The outer layers of the star will then begin to collapse, hastening the pace of heavy element fusion and further reducing the amount of energy available to hold up those outer layers. Density increases exponentially in the shrinking core, jamming together protons and electrons so tightly that it becomes an entirely new entity: a neutron star.
At this point, the core cannot get any denser. The star’s massive outer shells – still tumbling inward and still chock-full of volatile elements – no longer have anywhere to go. They slam into the core like a speeding oil rig crashing into a brick wall, and erupt into a monstrous explosion: a supernova. The extraordinary energies generated during this blast finally allow the fusion of elements even heavier than iron, from cobalt all the way to uranium.
Periodic Table of Elements. Massive stars can fuse elements up to Iron (Fe), atomic number 26. Elements with atomic numbers 27 through 92 are produced in the aftermath of a massive star’s core collapse.
The energetic shock wave produced by the supernova moves out into the cosmos, disbursing heavy elements in its wake. These atoms can later be incorporated into planetary systems like our own. Given the right conditions – for instance, an appropriately stable star and a position within its Habitable Zone – these elements provide the building blocks for complex life.
Today, our everyday lives are made possible by these very atoms, forged long ago in the life and death throes of massive stars. Our ability to do anything at all – wake up from a deep sleep, enjoy a delicious meal, drive a car, write a sentence, add and subtract, solve a problem, call a friend, laugh, cry, sing, dance, run, jump, and play – is governed mostly by the behavior of tiny chains of hydrogen combined with heavier elements like carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and phosphorus.
Other heavy elements are present in smaller quantities in the body, but are nonetheless just as vital to proper functioning. For instance, calcium, fluorine, magnesium, and silicon work alongside phosphorus to strengthen and grow our bones and teeth; ionized sodium, potassium, and chlorine play a vital role in maintaining the body’s fluid balance and electrical activity; and iron comprises the key portion of hemoglobin, the protein that equips our red blood cells with the ability to deliver the oxygen we inhale to the rest of our body.
So, the next time you are having a bad day, try this: close your eyes, take a deep breath, and contemplate the chain of events that connects your body and mind to a place billions of lightyears away, deep in the distant reaches of space and time. Recall that massive stars, many times larger than our sun, spent millions of years turning energy into matter, creating the atoms that make up every part of you, the Earth, and everyone you have ever known and loved.
We human beings are so small; and yet, the delicate dance of molecules made from this star stuff gives rise to a biology that enables us to ponder our wider Universe and how we came to exist at all. Carl Sagan himself explained it best: “Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We long to return; and we can, because the cosmos is also within us. We’re made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.”
An artistic image of the explosion of a star leading to a gamma-ray burst. (Source: FUW/Tentaris/Maciej Fro?ow)
Gamma ray bursts (GRBs) are some of the brightest, most dramatic events in the Universe. These cosmic tempests are characterized by a spectacular explosion of photons with energies 1,000,000 times greater than the most energetic light our eyes can detect. Due to their explosive power, long-lasting GRBs are predicted to have catastrophic consequences for life on any nearby planet. But could this type of event occur in our own stellar neighborhood? In a new paper published in Physical Review Letters, two astrophysicists examine the probability of a deadly GRB occurring in galaxies like the Milky Way, potentially shedding light on the risk for organisms on Earth, both now and in our distant past and future.
There are two main kinds of GRBs: short, and long. Short GRBs last less than two seconds and are thought to result from the merger of two compact stars, such as neutron stars or black holes. Conversely, long GRBs last more than two seconds and seem to occur in conjunction with certain kinds of Type I supernovae, specifically those that result when a massive star throws off all of its hydrogen and helium during collapse.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, long GRBs are much more threatening to planetary systems than short GRBs. Since dangerous long GRBs appear to be relatively rare in large, metal-rich galaxies like our own, it has long been thought that planets in the Milky Way would be immune to their fallout. But take into account the inconceivably old age of the Universe, and “relatively rare” no longer seems to cut it.
In fact, according to the authors of the new paper, there is a 90% chance that a GRB powerful enough to destroy Earth’s ozone layer occurred in our stellar neighborhood some time in the last 5 billion years, and a 50% chance that such an event occurred within the last half billion years. These odds indicate a possible trigger for the second worst mass extinction in Earth’s history: the Ordovician Extinction. This great decimation occurred 440-450 million years ago and led to the death of more than 80% of all species.
Today, however, Earth appears to be relatively safe. Galaxies that produce GRBs at a far higher rate than our own, such as the Large Magellanic Cloud, are currently too far from Earth to be any cause for alarm. Additionally, our Solar System’s home address in the sleepy outskirts of the Milky Way places us far away from our own galaxy’s more active, star-forming regions, areas that would be more likely to produce GRBs. Interestingly, the fact that such quiet outer regions exist within spiral galaxies like our own is entirely due to the precise value of the cosmological constant – the factor that describes our Universe’s expansion rate – that we observe. If the Universe had expanded any faster, such galaxies would not exist; any slower, and spirals would be far more compact and thus, far more energetically active.
In a future paper, the authors promise to look into the role long GRBs may play in Fermi’s paradox, the open question of why advanced lifeforms appear to be so rare in our Universe. A preprint of their current work can be accessed on the ArXiv.
The Victor M. Blanco telescope at Cerro Tololo Interamerican Observatory (CTIO) in the Chilean Andes. Credit: Berkeley Lab
Since the early 20th century, scientists and physicists have been burdened with explaining how and why the Universe appears to be expanding at an accelerating rate. For decades, the most widely accepted explanation is that the cosmos is permeated by a mysterious force known as “dark energy”. In addition to being responsible for cosmic acceleration, this energy is also thought to comprise 68.3% of the universe’s non-visible mass.
Much like dark matter, the existence of this invisible force is based on observable phenomena and because it happens to fit with our current models of cosmology, and not direct evidence. Instead, scientists must rely on indirect observations, watching how fast cosmic objects (specifically Type Ia supernovae) recede from us as the universe expands.
This process would be extremely tedious for scientists – like those who work for the Dark Energy Survey (DES) – were it not for the new algorithms developed collaboratively by researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and UC Berkeley.
“Our algorithm can classify a detection of a supernova candidate in about 0.01 seconds, whereas an experienced human scanner can take several seconds,” said Danny Goldstein, a UC Berkeley graduate student who developed the code to automate the process of supernova discovery on DES images.
Currently in its second season, the DES takes nightly pictures of the Southern Sky with DECam – a 570-megapixel camera that is mounted on the Victor M. Blanco telescope at Cerro Tololo Interamerican Observatory (CTIO) in the Chilean Andes. Every night, the camera generates between 100 Gigabytes (GB) and 1 Terabyte (TB) of imaging data, which is sent to the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and DOE’s Fermilab in Illinois for initial processing and archiving.
By studying Type Ia supernova, astronomers can measure dark energy and the expansion of the universe. Credit: NASA/CXC/M. Weiss
Object recognition programs developed at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) and implemented at NCSA then comb through the images in search of possible detections of Type Ia supernovae. These powerful explosions occur in binary star systems where one star is a white dwarf, which accretes material from a companion star until it reaches a critical mass and explodes in a Type Ia supernova.
“These explosions are remarkable because they can be used as cosmic distance indicators to within 3-10 percent accuracy,” says Goldstein.
Distance is important because the further away an object is located in space, the further back in time it is. By tracking Type Ia supernovae at different distances, researchers can measure cosmic expansion throughout the universe’s history. This allows them to put constraints on how fast the universe is expanding and maybe even provide other clues about the nature of dark energy.
“Scientifically, it’s a really exciting time because several groups around the world are trying to precisely measure Type Ia supernovae in order to constrain and understand the dark energy that is driving the accelerated expansion of the universe,” says Goldstein, who is also a student researcher in Berkeley Lab’s Computational Cosmology Center (C3).
Goldstein’s new code uses machine learning techniques to vet detections of supernova candidates. Credit: Danny Goldstein, UC Berkeley/Berkeley Lab)
The DES begins its search for Type Ia explosions by uncovering changes in the night sky, which is where the image subtraction pipeline developed and implemented by researchers in the DES supernova working group comes in. The pipeline subtracts images that contain known cosmic objects from new images that are exposed nightly at CTIO.
Each night, the pipeline produces between 10,000 and a few hundred thousand detections of supernova candidates that need to be validated.
“Historically, trained astronomers would sit at the computer for hours, look at these dots, and offer opinions about whether they had the characteristics of a supernova, or whether they were caused by spurious effects that masquerade as supernovae in the data. This process seems straightforward until you realize that the number of candidates that need to be classified each night is prohibitively large and only one in a few hundred is a real supernova of any type,” says Goldstein. “This process is extremely tedious and time-intensive. It also puts a lot of pressure on the supernova working group to process and scan data fast, which is hard work.”
To simplify the task of vetting candidates, Goldstein developed a code that uses the machine learning technique “Random Forest” to vet detections of supernova candidates automatically and in real-time to optimize them for the DES. The technique employs an ensemble of decision trees to automatically ask the types of questions that astronomers would typically consider when classifying supernova candidates.
Evolution of a Type Ia supernova. Credit: NASA/ESA/A. Feild
At the end of the process, each detection of a candidate is given a score based on the fraction of decision trees that considered it to have the characteristics of a detection of a supernova. The closer the classification score is to one, the stronger the candidate. Goldstein notes that in preliminary tests, the classification pipeline achieved 96 percent overall accuracy.
“When you do subtraction alone you get far too many ‘false-positives’ — instrumental or software artifacts that show up as potential supernova candidates — for humans to sift through,” says Rollin Thomas, of Berkeley Lab’s C3, who was Goldstein’s collaborator.
He notes that with the classifier, researchers can quickly and accurately strain out the artifacts from supernova candidates. “This means that instead of having 20 scientists from the supernova working group continually sift through thousands of candidates every night, you can just appoint one person to look at maybe few hundred strong candidates,” says Thomas. “This significantly speeds up our workflow and allows us to identify supernovae in real-time, which is crucial for conducting follow up observations.”
“Using about 60 cores on a supercomputer we can classify 200,000 detections in about 20 minutes, including time for database interaction and feature extraction.” says Goldstein.
Goldstein and Thomas note that the next step in this work is to add a second-level of machine learning to the pipeline to improve the classification accuracy. This extra layer would take into account how the object was classified in previous observations as it determines the probability that the candidate is “real.” The researchers and their colleagues are currently working on different approaches to achieve this capability.
The four dots around the bright source, an elliptical galaxy, are multiple images of the new supernova taken with the Hubble Space Telescope between November 10-20, 2014. In the bottom image, the galaxy has been digitally removed to show only the supernova. The line segments are diffraction spikes from a nearby star. Credit: P.L. Kelly et. all
How about four supernovae for the price of one? Using the Hubble Space Telescope, Dr. Patrick Kelly of the University of California-Berkeley along with the GLASS (Grism Lens Amplified Survey from Space) and Hubble Frontier Fields teams, discovered a remote supernova lensed into four copies of itself by the powerful gravity of a foreground galaxy cluster. Dubbed SN Refsdal, the object was discovered in the rich galaxy cluster MACS J1149.6+2223 five billion light years from Earth in the constellation Leo. It’s the first multiply-lensed supernova every discovered and one of nature’s most exotic mirages.
The lensed supernova was discovered far behind the rich galaxy cluster MACS J1149.6+2223. The cluster is one of the most massive known and gained notoriety in 2012 when astronomers harnessed its powerful lensing ability to uncover the most distant galaxy known at the time. Credit: NASA/ESA/M. Postman STScI/CLASH team
Gravitational lensing grew out of Einstein’s Theory of Relativitywherein he predicted massive objects would bend and warp the fabric of spacetime. The more massive the object, the more severe the bending. We can picture this by imagining a child standing on a trampoline, her weight pressing a dimple into the fabric. Replace the child with a 200-pound adult and the surface of the trampoline sags even more.
Massive objects like the Sun and even the planets warp the fabric of space. Here a planet orbits the Sun but doesn’t fall in because of its sideways orbital motion.
Similarly, the massive Sun creates a deep, but invisible dimple in the fabric of spacetime. The planets feel this ‘curvature of space’ and literally roll toward the Sun. Only their sideways motion or angular momentum keeps them from falling straight into the solar inferno.
Curved space created by massive objects also bends light rays. Einstein predicted that light from a star passing near the Sun or other massive object would follow this invisible curved spacescape and be deflected from an otherwise straight path. In effect, the object acts as a lens, bending and refocusing the light from the distant source into either a brighter image or multiple and distorted images. Also known as the deflection of starlight, nowadays we call it gravitational lensing.
This illustration shows how gravitational lensing works. The gravity of a large galaxy cluster is so strong, it bends, brightens and distorts the light of distant galaxies behind it. The scale has been greatly exaggerated; in reality, the distant galaxy is much further away and much smaller. Credit: NASA, ESA, L. Calcada
Simulation of distorted spacetime around a massive galaxy cluster over time
Turns out there are lots of these gravitational lenses out there in the form of massive clusters of galaxies. They contain regular matter as well as vast quantities of the still-mysterious dark matter that makes up 96% of the material stuff in the universe. Rich galaxy clusters act like telescopes – their enormous mass and powerful gravity magnify and intensify the light of galaxies billions of light years beyond, making visible what would otherwise never be seen.
This cropped image shows the central slice of the MACS J1149 galaxy cluster. A massive elliptical galaxy lenses the light of SN Refsdal into four separate images. It also distorts the purplish spiral galaxy that’s host to the supernova. Credit: NASA/ESA/M. Postman STScI/CLASH team
Let’s return to SN Refsdal, named for Sjur Refsdal, a Norwegian astrophysicist who did early work in the field of gravitational lensing. A massive elliptical galaxy in the MACS J1149 cluster “lenses” the 9.4 billion light year distant supernova and its host spiral galaxy from background obscurity into the limelight. The elliptical’s powerful gravity’s having done a fine job of distorting spacetime to bring the supernova into view also distorts the shape of the host galaxy and splits the supernova into four separate, similarly bright images. To create such neat symmetry, SN Refsdal must be precisely aligned behind the galaxy’s center.
What looks like a galaxy with five nuclei really has just one (at center) surrounded by a mirage of four images of a distant quasar. The galaxy lies 400 million light years away; the quasar about 8 billion. Credit: NASA/ESA/Hubble
The scenario here bears a striking resemblance to Einstein’s Cross, a gravitationally lensed quasar, where the light of a remote quasar has been broken into four images arranged about the foreground lensing galaxy. The quasar images flicker or change in brightness over time as they’re microlensed by the passage of individual stars within the galaxy. Each star acts as a smaller lens within the main lens.
Color-composite image of the lensing elliptical galaxy and distorted background host spiral (top). The green circles, S1-4, show the locations of the supernova images, while another quadruply imaged segment of the spiral arm is marked in red. The bottom panels show two additional lensed images of the spiral host galaxy visible in the galaxy cluster field. Talk about a funhouse mirror! Credit: P.L. Kelly/GLASS/Hubble Frontier Fields
Detailed color images taken by the GLASS and Hubble Frontier Fields groups show the supernova’s host galaxy is also multiply-imaged by the galaxy cluster’s gravity. According to their recent paper, Kelly and team are still working to obtain spectra of the supernova to determine if it resulted from the uncontrolled burning and explosion of a white dwarf star (Type Ia) or the cataclysmic collapse and rebound of a supergiant star that ran out of fuel (Type II).
The time light takes to travel to the Earth from each of the lensed images is different because each follows a slightly different path around the center of the lensing galaxy. Some paths are shorter, some longer. By timing the brightness variations between the individual images the team hopes to provide constraints not only on the distribution of bright matter vs. dark matter in the lensing galaxy and in the cluster but use that information to determine the expansion rate of the universe.
Left Panel: SNR1987A as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2010.Middle Panel: SNR1987A as seen by the Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA) in New South Wales and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile. Right Panel: A computer generated visualisation of the remnant showing the possible location of a Pulsar. Credit: ATCA & ALMA Observations & data - G. Zanardo et al. / HST Image: NASA, ESA, K. France (University of Colorado, Boulder), P. Challis and R. Kirshner (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics)
A team of Australian astronomers has been busy utilizing some of the world’s leading radio telescopes located in both Australia and Chile to carve away at the layered remains of a relatively new supernova. Designated as SN1987A, the 28 year-old stellar cataclysm came to Southern Hemisphere observer’s attention when it sprang into action at the edge of the Large Magellanic Cloud some two and a half decades ago. Since then, it has provided researchers around the world with a ongoing source of information about one of the Universe’s “most extreme events”.
Representing the University of Western Australia node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, PhD Candidate Giovanna Zanardo led the team focusing on the supernova with the Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA) in New South Wales. Their observations took in the wavelengths spanning the radio to the far infrared.
“By combining observations from the two telescopes we’ve been able to distinguish radiation being emitted by the supernova’s expanding shock wave from the radiation caused by dust forming in the inner regions of the remnant,” said Giovanna Zanardo of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) in Perth, Western Australia.
“This is important because it means we’re able to separate out the different types of emission we’re seeing and look for signs of a new object which may have formed when the star’s core collapsed. It’s like doing a forensic investigation into the death of a star.”
“Our observations with the ATCA and ALMA radio telescopes have shown signs of something never seen before, located at the centre or the remnant. It could be a pulsar wind nebula, driven by the spinning neutron star, or pulsar, which astronomers have been searching for since 1987. It’s amazing that only now, with large telescopes like ALMA and the upgraded ATCA, we can peek through the bulk of debris ejected when the star exploded and see what’s hiding underneath.”
A video compilation showing Supernova Remnant 1987A as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2010, and by radio telescopes located in Australia and Chile in 2012. The piece ends with a computer generated visualization of the remnant showing the possible location of a Pulsar. Credit: Dr Toby Potter, ICRAR-UWA, Dr Rick Newton, ICRAR-UWA
But, there is more. Not long ago, researchers published another paper which appeared in the Astrophysical Journal. Here they made an effort to solve another unanswered riddle about SN1987A. Since 1992 the supernova appears to be “brighter” on one side than it does the other! Dr. Toby Potter, another researcher from ICRAR’s UWA node took on this curiosity by creating a three-dimensional simulation of the expanding supernova shockwave.
“By introducing asymmetry into the explosion and adjusting the gas properties of the surrounding environment, we were able to reproduce a number of observed features from the real supernova such as the persistent one-sidedness in the radio images”, said Dr. Toby Potter.
So what’s going on? By creating a model which spans over a length of time, researchers were able to emulate an expanding shock front along the eastern edge of the supernova remnant. This region moves away more quickly than its counterpart and generates more radio emissions. When it encounters the equatorial ring – as observed by the Hubble Space Telescope – the effect becomes even more pronounced.
A visualization showing how Supernova1987A evolves between May of 1989 and July of 2014. Credit: Dr Toby Potter, ICRAR-UWA, Dr Rick Newton, ICRAR-UWA
“Our simulation predicts that over time the faster shock will move beyond the ring first. When this happens, the lop-sidedness of radio asymmetry is expected to be reduced and may even swap sides.”
“The fact that the model matches the observations so well means that we now have a good handle on the physics of the expanding remnant and are beginning to understand the composition of the environment surrounding the supernova – which is a big piece of the puzzle solved in terms of how the remnant of SN1987A formed.”
An animation showing a comparison between the confirmation image (at top) and an archive photo. Credit: Ernesto Guido, Martino Nicolini, Nick Howes
I sat straight up in my seat when I learned of the discovery of a possible new supernova in the bright Virgo galaxy M61. Since bright usually means close, this newly exploding star may soon become visible in smaller telescopes. It was discovered at magnitude +13.6 on October 29th by Koichi Itagaki of Japan, a prolific hunter of supernovae with 94 discoveries or co-discoveries to his credit. Itagaki used a CCD camera and 19.6-inch (0.50-m) reflector to spy the new star within one of the galaxy’s prominent spiral arms. Comparison with earlier photos showed no star at the position. Itagaki also nabbed not one but two earlier supernovae in M61 in December 2008 and November 2006.
The possible supernova in the bright galaxy M61 in Virgo is located 40″ east and 7″ south of the galaxy’s core at right ascension (RA) 12 h 22′, declination (Dec) +4º 28′. It’s currently magnitude +13.4 and visible in the morning sky before dawn in 8-inch and larger telescopes. Credit: Ernesto Guido, Martino Nicolini, Nick Howes
Overnight, Ernesto Guido and crew used a remote telescope in New Mexico to confirm the new object. We’re still waiting for a spectrum to be absolutely sure this is the real deal and also to determine what type of explosion occurred. In the meantime, it may well brighten in the coming mornings.
M61 is a beautiful barred spiral galaxy located about 55 million light years from Earth in the constellation Virgo. It’s one of the few galaxies to show spiral structure in smaller telescopes. Credit: Hunter Wilson
Supernovae are divided into two broad categories – Type Ia and Type II. In a Type Ia event, a planet-sized white dwarf star in close orbit around a normal star siphons off matter from its companion which builds up on the surface of the dwarf until it reaches critical mass at which point the core ignites and consumes itself and the star in one titanic nuclear fusion reaction. A cataclysmic explosion ensues as the star self-destructs in blaze of glory.
Evolution of a Type Ia supernova. Credit: NASA/ESA/A. Feild
Type Ia explosions can become 5 billion times brighter than the Sun – the reason we can see them across so many light years – and eject matter into space at 5,000 – 20,000 km/second. Type II events mark the end of the life of a massive supergiant star. As these behemoths age, they burn by fusing heavier and heavier elements in their cores from hydrogen to carbon to silicon and finally, iron-nickel. Iron is inert and can’t be cooked or fused to create more energy. The star’s internal heat source, which has been staving back the force of gravity all these millions of years, shuts down. Gravity takes hold with a vengeance, the star quickly collapses then rebounds in a titanic explosion. Ka-boom!
Artist’s impression of a Type II supernova explosion which involves the destruction of a massive supergiant star. Credit: ESO
Like the Type Ia event, a Type II supernova grows to fantastic brilliance. Besides a legacy of radiant light, star debris, the creation of heavy elements like gold and lead, a Type II event will sometimes leave behind a tiny, city-sized, rapidly-spinning neutron star – the much compressed core of the original star – or even a black hole. So yes, life can continue for a giant star after a supernova event. But like seeing a former classmate at your 40th high school reunion, you’d hardly recognize it.
The “Y” or “cup” of Virgo rises into good view shortly before the start of dawn or about 2 hours before sunrise. This map shows the sky facing east around 6 a.m. local time (DST) tomorrow October 31 and 5 a.m. standard time starting Sunday when Daylight Saving Time ends. Source: Stellarium
Are you itching to see this new supernova for yourself? Here are a couple maps to help you find it. M61 is located in the middle of the “Y” of Virgo not far from the familiar bright double star Gamma Virginis. From many locations, the galaxy climbs to 15-20° altitude in the east-southeast sky just before the start of dawn, just high enough for a good view. Once you find the galaxy, look for a small “star” superimposed on its eastern spiral arm as shown in the photo at the top of this article.
In this close up view, stars are shown to magnitude +7.5. M61 is right between 16 and 17 Virginis (magnitudes 5 and 6.5 respectively). Click to enlarge. Source: Stellarium
I’ll be out there with my scope watching and will report back once it’s established what type of supernova happens to be blowing up in our eyepieces. More information about the new object can be found anytime at David Bishop’s Latest Supernovae site. Good luck, clear skies!
** Update Nov. 1 : M61’s supernova now has a name and type! SN 2014dt is a Type Ia (exploding white dwarf) with some peculiarities in its spectrum. It’s also little brighter at magnitude +13.2.
Artist's impression of cosmic rays striking Earth (Simon Swordy/University of Chicago, NASA)
Quick, do you have an Android phone in your pocket? A few small changes and you could help physicists probe more of the curious nature of cosmic rays, high-energy particles that emanate from outside our solar system.
Just download an app, cover up your phone’s camera with duct tape, then place it somewhere (running idle) with the screen facing up. If a particle “event” happens, the information will be logged in a central database.
The project (called Distributed Electronic Cosmic-ray Observatory or DECO) aims to record secondary particles called muons that occur when cosmic rays hit the Earth’s atmosphere. Scientists believe cosmic rays are created in black holes and supernovas, but more studies are needed.
Screenshot of an Android app developed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison that aims to capture cosmic rays. Credit: Justin Vandenbroucke
Researchers at the Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center (WIPAC), led by Justin Vandenbroucke, note that there are things about cosmic rays that confuse physicists. Their paths in space change as they go across magnetic fields, and it makes searching for other astronomy events difficult. That’s where they hope the phone study will be useful.
“Smartphone cameras use silicon chips that work through what is called the photoelectric effect, in which particles of light, or photons, hit a silicon surface and release an electric charge,” the University of Wisconsin-Madison wrote in a press release.
“The same is true for muons. When a muon strikes the semiconductor that underpins a smartphone camera, it liberates an electric charge and creates a signature in pixels that can be logged, stored and analyzed.”
For more details on how to run and use the app, consult this page (it’s the second item).
The above sequence depicts a rare supernova explosion. The topic panel
Massive stars end their lives dramatically. Once the nuclear fuel deep within their cores is spent, there’s no longer any outward pressure to push against gravity, and the star collapses. But while the inner layers fall in to form a black hole or a neutron star, the outer layers fall faster, hitting the inner layers, and rebounding in a huge supernova explosion.
That’s the textbook definition. But some of these supernovae defy explanation. In 2011 one such explosion, dubbed SN 2011dh, pierced the Whirlpool galaxy, roughly 24 million-light years away. At the time astronomers were baffled. But now, thanks to NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, they’ve discovered a companion star to this rare supernova and fit the final puzzle pieces together.
SN 2011dh is a Type IIb supernova, unusual in that it contains very little hydrogen and unexplainable via a textbook definition. Even so, astronomers can shed light on the progenitor star simply by digging through archived images from HST. Thanks to HST’s wealth of data and the fact that it observes the Whirlpool galaxy often, two independent research teams both detected a source — a yellow supergiant star — at the right location.
But astronomers don’t think yellow supergiant stars are capable of becoming supernovae … at least not in isolation.
At this point, controversy arose within the astronomical community. Several experts proposed that the observation was a false cosmic alignment and that the actual progenitor was an unseen massive star. Other experts proposed that the progenitor could have been the yellow supergiant, but that it must have belonged in a binary star system.
When a massive star in a binary system overflows its Roche lobe — the region outside that star where gravity dominates — it can pour material onto its smaller companion, therefore losing its hydrogen envelope and shrinking in mass.
At the time the mass-donor explodes, the companion star should be a massive blue star, having gained material during the mass transfer. Its high temperature should also cause it to emit mostly in the ultraviolet range, therefore rendering it invisible in any visible images.
So Gastón Folatelli from the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (IPMU) and colleagues decided to take a second look at the mysterious supernova in ultraviolet light. And their observations matched their expectations. The original supernova had faded, and a different point source had taken its place.
“One of the most exciting moments in my career as an astronomer was when I displayed the newly arrived HST images and saw the object right there, where we had anticipated it to be all along,” said Folatelli in a news release.
The research illustrates the intricate interplay between theory and observation. Astronomers often rely on theories long before they gain the technology necessary to provide the correct observations or spend years trying to explain odd observations with complex theoretical modeling. More often, however, the two coexist as theory and observation banter back and forth.
The findings have been published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters and are available online.
Astronomers are gazing closely at supernova 2014J (inset) to see what sort of triggers caused the star explosion. Credit: NASA/SAO/CXC/R. Margutti et al
X marks the spot: after probing the area where a star used to be, in X-rays, astronomers have been able to rule out one cause for the supernova explosion.
Because the Chandra X-Ray Observatory did not detect anything unusual in X-rays, astronomers say this means that a white dwarf was not responsible for pulling off material from a massive star that exploded (from Earth’s vantage point) on Jan. 21, 2014, triggering excitement from professional and amateur astronomers alike.
“While it may sound a bit odd, we actually learned a great deal about this supernova by detecting absolutely nothing,” stated study leader Raffaella Margutti of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Massachusetts. “Now we can essentially rule out that the explosion was caused by a white dwarf continuously pulling material from a companion star.”
So what caused it? Possibly two white dwarfs merged instead. Follow-up observations will take place in Messier 88 and the source of the explosion, which was about 12 million light-years from Earth. While that’s a long time by human standards, astronomers point out that is close on the cosmic distance scale.
