Podcaster: Richard Drumm
Title: UNAWE Space Scoop – A Supernova Coming Back to Life
Organization: 365 Days Of Astronomy
Link : http://365daysofastronomy.org/ ; https://spacescoop.org/en/scoops/2125/this-one-winged-cosmic-butterfly-holds-a-baby-star/
Description: Space scoop, news for children.
Baby stars form when thick clouds of gas and dust fall into themselves or collapse due to gravity. Not all of the material collapses to form a baby star.
For only the second time, astronomers saw a supernova light up again. Strange, since the brightness of supernovae fades away in a couple months.
An international team of researchers from Kyoto University and Osaka University were looking at SN 2018ivc using the ALMA Observatory, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile, and found something unusual.
– By the way, the SN in SN2018ivc stands for supernova.
SN 2018ivc, located in the galaxy M77, appeared to dim 200 days after the initial explosion and began to light up again 800 days later.
– Also by the way, the M in M77 stands for Messier.
Bio: Richard Drumm is President of the Charlottesville Astronomical Society and President of 3D – Drumm Digital Design, a video production company with clients such as Kodak, Xerox and GlaxoSmithKline Pharmaceuticals. He was an observer with the UVa Parallax Program at McCormick Observatory in 1981 & 1982. He has found that his greatest passion in life is public outreach astronomy and he pursues it at every opportunity.
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Transcript:
This is the 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast. Today we bring you a new episode in our Space Scoop series. This show is produced in collaboration with Universe Awareness, a program that strives to inspire every child with our wonderful cosmos.
Today’s story is…
A Supernova Coming Back to Life
For only the second time, astronomers saw a supernova light up again.
Strange, since the brightness of supernovae fades away in a couple months.
An international team of researchers from Kyoto University and Osaka University were looking at SN 2018ivc using the ALMA Observatory, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile, and found something unusual.
By the way, the SN in SN2018ivc stands for supernova.
SN 2018ivc, located in the galaxy M77, appeared to dim 200 days after the initial explosion and began to light up again 800 days later.
Also by the way, the M in M77 stands for Messier.
As in Charles Messier, an astronomer in the late 1700s & early 1800s Paris who studied the night sky and identified 110 nebulae & galaxies.
He didn’t really identify them, he basically just made a list of faint, fuzzy things that he saw in his telescope that weren’t comets.
Comets were what he was interested in, they were his jam & he discovered 13 of them during his life.
French King Louis 15th even nicknamed him “The Ferret of Comets”!
Where was I? Oh yeah! SN 2018ivc.
In a binary star system, if the stars are close enough, the companion star’s gravity can pull material from the more massive supernova progenitor, the star that’s about to go boom!
This is a progenitor that’s going to be Type II, a core-collapse supernova, 8 to 20 solar masses or so.
The massive progenitor can lose mass because it is likely now a helium star surrounded by a Roche Lobe filled with hydrogen.
This hydrogen is also spilling out from the Roche Lobe and forming a shell of gas around the whole binary system.
The progenitor will end up losing more mass if the stars are close & less mass if they’re farther apart.
But what if the two stars aren’t too close and aren’t too far – somewhere in the middle, at an intermediate distance?
Enter SN 2018ivc!
Using a computer model, the researchers explain that the intermediate distance between SN 2018ivc and its companion star has caused a lot of interactions between them.
These interactions created a huge hollow shell of star stuff, some 1,500 years before the actual supernova.
And that shell can have from 1 to 10 times our Sun’s mass, so it’s no skimpy soap bubble!
After years of ejecting hydrogen from the star, it finally went BOOM.
This is the initial flash of light that was observed.
Then 200 days after the explosion the supernova ejecta, the stuff that was thrown off in the explosion, had not yet reached the hollow shell, and SN 2018ivc did as all supernovae do, it grew dimmer.
But then sometime between day 200 and day 1,000, probably around day 800, the ejecta must have crashed into the hollow shell of star stuff, causing it to light up again.
BOOM number two!
Hey, here’s a cool fact!
A recent James Webb Space Telescope observation shows a galaxy cluster having a supernova appear three times.
But this is due to a light-bending cosmic magic trick called ‘gravitational lensing’.
The massive galaxy cluster RX J2129 is located about 3.2 billion light-years from Earth, in the constellation Aquarius.
It bent light from the much more distant supernova and the light arrived here at different times, causing the effect.
This is a different critter altogether from SN 2018ivc.
Thank you for listening to the 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast!
365 Days of Astronomy
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