A Northwestern University-led team of astronomers has captured the most detailed glimpse yet of a doomed star before it exploded.
Using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the international team identified a supernova’s source star, or progenitor, at mid-infrared wavelengths for the first time. These observations — combined with archival images from the Hubble Space Telescope — revealed the explosion came from a massive red supergiant star, cloaked in an unexpected shroud of dust.
The discovery may help solve the decades-old mystery of why massive red supergiants rarely explode. Afterall, theoretical models predict red supergiants should make up the majority of core-collapse supernovae. The new study shows these stars do explode but are simply hidden out of sight, within thick clouds of dust. With JWST’s new capabilities, astronomers can finally pierce through the dust to spot these phenomena, closing the gap between theory and observation.
The study was published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. It marks the JWST’s first detection of a supernova progenitor.
“For multiple decades, we have been trying to determine exactly what the explosions of red supergiant stars look like,” said Northwestern’s Charlie Kilpatrick, who led the study. “Only now, with JWST, do we finally have the quality of data and infrared observations that allow us to say precisely the exact type of red supergiant that exploded and what its immediate environment looked like. We’ve been waiting for this to happen — for a supernova to explode in a galaxy that JWST had already observed. We combined Hubble and JWST data sets to completely characterize this star for the first time.”
An expert on the lives and deaths of massive stars, Kilpatrick is a research assistant professor at Northwestern’s Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics. Aswin Suresh, a graduate student in physics and astronomy at Northwestern’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and member of Kilpatrick’s research group, is a key coauthor on the paper.
Read the full Northwestern Now article.
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