Space Telescope Finds Supernova

ASTRONOMERS spotted something unusual happening in a distant galaxy in recent images from the James Webb Space Telescope — something that wasn’t there when Hubble last looked at the same galaxy.

"We suspect it's a supernova," astronomer Mike Engesser of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) tells Inverse. Finding short-lived cosmic events like supernovae isn’t what Webb was designed to do, but the newly-operational space telescope seems to be full of surprises. 

And this one could open the door for looking for the death throes of the universe's first generations of massive stars.  WHAT’S NEW – Engesser and his colleagues say the bright object is probably the first supernova spotted by the Webb Telescope. 

It's extremely bright compared to the rest of the galaxy, for one thing. And Webb observed the galaxy, called SDSS.J141930.11+5251593, twice, five days apart; the object dimmed, just slightly, over those five days — classic supernova behavior.

"We would need more time series data to make a determination, but the data we do have does match that of a supernova, so it's a very good candidate," says Engesser.  READ MORE...

Swiss Cheese Bubble Created by Supernovas

 

Artist's illustration of the Local Bubble with the sun's location in the center and star formation occurring on the bubble's surface. (Image credit: Leah Hustak (STScI))

In the new study, published online Jan. 12 in the journal Nature, researchers accurately mapped the star-forming regions surrounding the Local Bubble and, in doing so, calculated how fast the superbubble is expanding. 

This allowed the team to work out exactly how many supernovas were needed to carve out the gigantic cosmic void and better understand how star-forming regions are created across the Milky Way.Earth is slap bang in the middle of a 1,000 light-year-wide bubble with a dense surface birthing thousands of baby stars. Researchers have long wondered what created this "superbubble." Now, a new study suggests that at least 15 powerful star explosions inflated this cosmic bubble.

Astronomers in the 1970s first discovered the gigantic void, known as the Local Bubble, after realizing that no stars had formed inside the blob for around 14 million years. The only stars inside the bubble either existed before the bubble emerged or formed outside the void and are now passing through; the sun is one such trespasser. 

This setup had suggested that several supernovas were responsible for this void. Those stellar explosions, the researchers said, would have blasted the materials needed to make new stars, such as hydrogen gas, to the edge of a huge area in space, leaving behind the Local Bubble that's surrounded by a frenzy of star births.  READ MORE...

Old Supernova

 

Two Hubble images show the galaxy cluster MACS J0138. In the 2016 image, light from the ancient Supernova Requiem appears in three different spots simultaneously on the edge of the cluster (circled in white). In the 2019 image, they are gone.  (Image credit: NASA/ Joseph DePasquale)

The universe is an endless expanse of mystery, majesty and mind-blowing spectacle. So why, a few years from now, is the cosmos airing a "rerun" of a supernova explosion that we already watched in 2016?

Known as Supernova Requiem, the faint glint of an ancient, 10 billion-year-old explosion is expected to reappear in the sky sometime around the year 2037 — even after the same light source already smiled for NASA's Hubble Space Telescope three times in 2016.

The reason for this cosmic rerun doesn't have anything to do with the supernova itself, research published Sept. 13 in the journal Nature Astronomy suggests, but with the gargantuan cluster of galaxies that the nova's light has to pass by on its way to Earth.

"Whenever some light passes near a very massive object, like a galaxy or galaxy cluster, the warping of space-time that Einstein's theory of general relativity tells us is present for any mass, delays the travel of light around that mass," lead study author Steve Rodney, an assistant professor at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, said in a statement.

This phenomenon is called gravitational lensing. The effect occurs when a gravitationally massive object warps or lenses the light of distant stars and galaxies behind it — sometimes magnifying the light of distant objects, and sometimes distorting it. In the case of Supernova Requiem, the large galaxy cluster MACS J0138 is causing the stellar explosion's light to brighten, multiply and split into several different images, seemingly appearing at different points in the sky at different times, the researchers said.  READ MORE