Superdupernova
Posted on | May 8, 2007
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away:
The cataclysm — a monster more than a hundred times as energetic as the typical supernova in which the more massive stars end their lives — may be an example, they said, of a completely new type of explosion. Such a blast, proposed but never seen, would explain how the earliest and most massive stars in the universe ended their lives and strewed new elements across space to fertilize future stars and planets.
“It is quite possibly the most massive star that has ever been seen to explode,” said Nathan Smith of the University of California, Berkeley, who estimated it as “freakishly massive,” about 150 times the mass of the Sun…
Astronomers have been following the star since last September, when it was discovered in a galaxy 240 million light-years away in the constellation Perseus. The discovery was made by Robert Quimby, a University of Texas graduate student who was using a small robotic telescope at McDonald Observatory near Fort Davis, Texas, to troll for supernovas.
The star bears an eerie resemblance to Eta Carinae, a star in our own galaxy that has been burbling and bubbling in the last few centuries as if getting ready for its own outburst. The observations suggest that the troubled and enigmatic Eta Carinae, thought to weigh in at about 120 solar masses, could blow up sooner than theorists have thought. Mario Livio, a theorist at the Space Telescope Science Institute who was not involved in the research, said Eta Carinae’s death could be “the most spectacular star show in history.”
Cautioning that theorists still did know for sure what had caused the explosion announced Monday, Livio said: “Here we have the brightest supernova we have ever observed, and we don’t know the explosion mechanism. It doesn’t get any more exciting for a theorist.”
The explosion occurred before there were dinosaurs on Earth, and is only now visible to astronomers.
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