1/7/2022- 6:16 p.m. .
For years, experts thought the biggest stars in the universe, red supergiants, died with a whimper. But in 2020, astronomers witnessed quite the opposite.
One of these gleaming monsters — 10 times more massive than the sun — violently self-destructed after presenting the cosmos with a final, radiant beacon of starlight.
“This is a breakthrough in our understanding of what massive stars do moments before they die,” Wynn Jacobson-Galán said in a statement Thursday.
Jacobson-Galán is an astronomy research fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, and formerly was a graduate student researcher at Northwestern University, where a study of the dying star was conducted. “For the first time, we watched a red supergiant star explode.”
The star’s extreme illumination indicated it wasn’t dormant, or quiescent, as previously observed red supergiants had been prior to their demise. This shiny orb was very much active as it deteriorated, presumably releasing pent-up gas with great vigor and altering its internal structure somehow, according to the team.
Then, once the “bomb” detonated, a climactic Type II supernova event labeled SN2020tlf flooded the sky with light. “We’ve never confirmed such violent activity in a dying red supergiant star where we see it produce such a luminous emission, then collapse and combust,” Margutti said. “Until now.”
The researchers made the revelatory find by remotely collecting data from Hawaii’s Keck Observatory Deep Imaging and Multi-Object Spectrograph as well as Near Infrared Echellette Spectrograph. This innovative way of remotely retrieving astrophysical information fuels discoveries in a timely manner.Â
In the future, the group hopes to continue using the remote method to document even-more-surprising transient happenings, including events involving other enormous supernovas like the one chronicled in their recent study.
“I am most excited by all of the new ‘unknowns’ that have been unlocked by this discovery,” Jacobson-Galán said.Â
