Images captured by an amateur astronomer in Argentina has helped scientists obtain their first view of the initial burst of light from the explosion of a massive star.During tests of a new camera, V\u00edctor Buso captured images of a distant galaxy before and after the supernova\u2019s \u201cshock breakout\u201d\u2014when a supersonic pressure wave from the exploding core of the star hits and heats gas at the star\u2019s surface to a very high temperature, causing it to emit light and rapidly brighten.<\/p>\n
A supernova is the explosion of a massive star at the end of its life cycle.<\/p>\n
To date, no one has been able to capture the \u201cfirst optical light\u201d from a normal supernova (one not associated with a gamma-ray or x-ray burst), since stars explode seemingly at random in the sky and the light from shock breakout is fleeting.<\/p>\n
The new data can provide important clues to the physical structure of the star just before its catastrophic demise and to the nature of the explosion itself.<\/p>\n
\u201cProfessional astronomers have long been searching for such an event,\u201d said Alex Filippenko of University of California, Berkeley.<\/p>\n
Filippenko followed up the discovery with observations at the Lick and Keck observatories in the US that proved critical to a detailed analysis of explosion, called SN 2016gkg.<\/p>\n
\u201cObservations of stars in the first moments they begin exploding provide information that cannot be directly obtained in any other way,\u201d Filippenko added.<\/p>\n
The discovery and results of follow-up observations from around the world were published in the journal Nature.<\/p>\n
On September 20, 2016, Buso was testing a new camera on his 16-inch telescope by taking a series of short-exposure photographs of the spiral galaxy NGC 613, which is about 80 million light years from Earth and located within the southern constellation Sculptor.<\/p>\n
Luckily, he examined these images immediately and noticed a faint point of light quickly brightening near the end of a spiral arm that was not visible in his first set of images.<\/p>\n
An international team of researchers later determined that the explosion was a Type IIb supernova – the explosion of a massive star that had previously lost most of its hydrogen envelope.<\/p>\n
The team estimated that the initial mass of the star was about 20 times the mass of our Sun, though it lost most of its mass, probably to a companion star, and slimmed down to about five solar masses prior to exploding.<\/p>\n
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