Exploding star caught by NASA’s Kepler space telescope

A “shock breakout,” a phenomenon where a star releases immense energy and explodes in space, was caught for the first time in optical wavelength by the Kepler space telescope, NASA said on Monday.

Peter Garnavich, astrophysics professor at University of Notre Dame in Indiana, United States, analyzed the telescope at a 30-minute interval in three years from 500 different galaxies, searching around 50 trillion stars during the period. Together with his team, they patiently searched for massive stellar death explosions known as “supernovae.”

In a supernova, a supersonic shock wave will escape from the star’s core, resulting in a glimmering flash of light.

The last supernova discovered by NASA specialists was in 2011, when two red supergiants exploded which was viewed through Kepler, according to NASA’s bulletin. The first supergiant, named KSN 2011a, was roughly 300 times the size of the sun and 700 million light years away from Earth. KSN 2011d, the second supergiant, is more enormous than the first one—it is 500 times the sun’s size and is 1.2 billion light years away.

“That is the puzzle of these results,” Garnavich said in a report from NASA. “You look at two supernovae and see two different things. That’s maximum diversity.”

As observed, KSN 2011a’s shock breakout was not seen through the telescope because gas wrapped the supergiant’s surface. Both supernovae are classified as Type II—wherein the inner surface of a star runs out of nuclear fuel, causing its core to collapse as gravity conquers.

According to NASA, the groundbreaking discovery was featured in a research paper in the Astrophysical Journal. RAM