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The three panels represent moments before, when and after the faint supernova iPTF14gqr, visible in the middle panel, appeared in the outskirts of a spiral galaxy located 920 million light years away from us. Credit: SDSS / Caltech / Keck
Carnegie's Anthony Piro was part of a Caltech-led team of astronomers who observed a sudden death of a massive star that exploded in a surprisingly fast and rapidly fading supernova, possibly creating a compact neutron star binary system. Piro's theoretical work provided crucial context for the discovery. Their findings are published by Science.
Observations made by the Caltech team-including lead author Kishalay De and project principal investigator Mansi Kasliwal (herself a form-Carnegie postdoc) -suggest that the dying star had an unseen companion, which gravitationally siphoned away most of the star's mass before it exploded as a supernova. The explosion is believed to be a neutron star binary, proving that, for the first time, scientists have witnessed the birth of a binary system of cancer, and a team of Carnegie and UC Santa Cruz astronomers in August 2017.
A supernova occurs when a massive star-at least eight times the mass of the Sun-exhausts its nuclear fuel, causing the core to collapse and then rebound outward into a powerful explosion. After the star's outer layers have been blasted away, all that remains is a dense neutron star-an exotic star about the size of a city.
Usually, a lot of material-many times the mass of the Sun-is observed to be blasted away in a supernova. However, the event that has not been reported to me, has been reported to be one of the most popular of the Sun's mass.
"We saw this massive star's core collapse, but we saw remarkably little mass ejected," Kasliwal says. "We call this an ultra-stripped envelope supernova and it has long been predicted that they exist. This is the first time we have convincingly seen core collapse of a massive star that is so devoid of matter. "
Piro's theoretical modeling guided the interpretation of these observations. This allowed the observers to infer the presence of dense material surrounding the explosion.
"Discoveries like this is why it has been so important to build a theoretical astrophysics group at Carnegie," Piro said. "By combining observations and theory together, we can learn so much more about these amazing events."
The fact that the star has been implicated in this process has already had a lot of material, or that it would have grown large enough to collapse. But where was the missing mass hiding? The researchers have been trained by a compact companion star, such as a white dwarf, neutron star, or black hole.
The neutron star that was left behind the supernova Because this new neutron star and its companion are so close together, they will eventually merge into a collision. In fact, the merger of two neutron stars, and such crews, and platinum, and uranium .
The Palomar Transient Factory (iPTF), a nightly survey of the sky to look for transient, or short-lived, cosmic events like supernovae. Because the iPTF survey is such a close eye on the sky, iPTF has been observed in the first days after it had exploded. As the earth rotated and the Palomar telescope moved out of range, astronomers around the world collaborated to monitor iPTF 14gqr, continuously observing its evolution with a number of telescopes that today form the Global Relay of Observers Watching Transient Happen (GROWTH) network of observatories.
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