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Press Trust of IndiaJune 03, 2019 16:28:38 IST
Scientists have discovered about 1,800 new supernovae or stars that are exploding, which can help measure the speed of expansion of the universe.
Researchers at the Kavli Institute for Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU) and the University of Tokyo in Japan combined data from one of the most powerful digital cameras in the world and from a telescope capable of capturing a wider view of the night sky than other large telescopes. The discovery includes 58 Type Ia supernovae located eight billion light years away.
Type Ia supernovaes are useful because their constant maximum brightness allows researchers to calculate the distance between the star and the Earth. This is particularly useful for researchers who wish to measure the expansion of the universe.
A supernova is a name given to a star that explodes and has reached the end of its life. The star often becomes as bright as its host galaxy, shining a billion times brighter than the Sun between a month and six months before turning it off.
Image of representation. Image credit: NASA
In recent years, researchers have begun to report a new type of supernovae five to ten times brighter than type Ia supernovae. Named Supernovae Super-Luminous, many have tried to learn more about these stars. Their unusual brightness allows researchers to spot stars in the farthest reaches of the universe, usually too weak to be observed. Since the distant universe designates the primitive universe, the study of this type of star could reveal characteristics of the first massive stars created after the Big Bang. However, supernovae are rare events and there is only a handful of telescopes in the world capable of capturing sharp images of distant stars.
To maximize the chances of observing the supernova, the researchers used the Subaru telescope, capable of generating stellar images, and the Hyper Suprime-Cam, an 870-megapixel digital camera set at its peak, captured a very big part of the night sky a shot.
By taking repeated images of the same area of the night sky over a six-month period, researchers were able to identify new supernovae by looking for stars that suddenly looked brighter before gradually fading away.
As a result, the team identified five super-bright supernovae and about 400 Type Ia supernovae. Fifty-eight of these type Ia supernovae were located more than 8 billion light-years away from Earth.
In comparison, it took about 10 years for researchers using the Hubble Space Telescope to discover a total of 50 supernovae located more than eight billion light-years away from Earth.
"The Subaru Telescope and Hyper Suprime-Cam have already helped researchers create a 3D map of dark matter and observe primordial black holes, but this result now proves that this instrument has a very large capacity of detection of supernovae very far away from Earth, "said Naoki Yasuda, professor at Kavli IPMU.
The next step will be to use the data to compute a more accurate expansion of the universe and to study the evolution of dark energy over time.
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