“This is a fascinating event,” says Stanford Woosley of the University of California in Santa Cruz, US, who studies stars and supernovae. “But what exactly happened in the core of the star we don’t know at the moment,” he says. The star seems to have been teetering on the brink of destruction, with the first, nonfatal explosion somehow related to this instability. “Clearly these events must be related,” he told New Scientist. He says the first explosion must somehow be connected to the star’s destruction two years later. Stefan Immler of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, US, is part of a team that observed the second explosion with NASA’s Swift satellite. The highly unusual demise of SN 2006jc has aroused the curiosity of astronomers, who have followed the evolution of the supernova with a variety of telescopes.Ī team led by Ryan Foley of the University of California in Berkeley, US, studied it with ground-based telescopes, including the Keck I telescope atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii. Astronomers studying the expanding blast wave from a supernova called 1994W found signs that it had ejected material in a major outburst about 1.5 years earlier, but that original blast was not observed directly. Indirect evidence suggests that something similar happened in one other case, however. This is the first time that astronomers have witnessed a star suffer a pair of explosions, with the second one ending its life. This one was indeed a supernova, and was named SN 2006jc. The star was observed undergoing a second explosion on 11 October 2006.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |