It looks like you're using an Ad Blocker.
Please white-list or disable AboveTopSecret.com in your ad-blocking tool.
Thank you.
Some features of ATS will be disabled while you continue to use an ad-blocker.
The team says that this unprecedented look at one of the most fascinating and large-scale events in the Universe shows that there isn't always a 'calm before the storm' in terms of supernova blasts – something that challenges previous assumptions.
"This is a breakthrough in our understanding of what massive stars do moments before they die," says Wynn Jacobson-Galán, an astronomer from the University of California, Berkeley, and the study's lead author.
"Direct detection of pre-supernova activity in a red supergiant star has never been observed before in an ordinary Type II supernova. For the first time, we watched a red supergiant star explode!"
This dramatic process has never been seen in real time before, though. Two telescopes were involved in making the observations, both on Hawaii: the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy Pan-STARRS on Haleakalā, Maui, and the WM Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea, Hawaii Island.
The collected data is already providing new insights. There was direct evidence of dense circumstellar material surrounding the star when it exploded, for example, which the researchers think was the same gas they had spotted being ejected from the red supergiant several months before.
"It's like watching a ticking time bomb," says astrophysicist Raffaella Margutti, also from UC Berkeley. "We've never confirmed such violent activity in a dying red supergiant star where we see it produce such a luminous emission, then collapse and combust, until now."
www.sciencealert.com...
originally posted by: gortex
This dramatic process has never been seen in real-time before, though. Two telescopes were involved in making the observations,
originally posted by: buddha
No way is that a real video.
originally posted by: cooperton
originally posted by: buddha
No way is that a real video.
It's an animation of what they thought it might look like. I would love to see the actual data that made them think this is what happened. Sadly we're so often given the theatric rendering of these space event and they may be entirely misleading.
The data seems to show that it was a Pixelated change in luminosity at a distant point.
the journal article
Could anyone explain why they're so confident what they show in the animation is what happened?
The explosion of a supernova occurs in a star in a very short timespan of about 100 seconds. When a star undergoes a supernova explosion, it dies leaving behind a remnant: either a neutron star or a black hole.
curious.astro.cornell.edu... mediate