Astronomers witness the death of a red supergiant for the first time

Astronomers have captured the death of a red supergiant star for the first time.

The real-time discovery was published Jan. 6 in Astrophysical Journal and led by researchers from Northwestern University and the University of California, Berkeley.

According to a press release from Northwestern, the team observed the red supergiant for the past 130 days before it collapsed into a Type II supernova.

Previous observations have shown that the red supergiants were relatively inactive before death, with no evidence of violent flares or light emissions.

These researchers, however, detected bright radiation from a red supergiant within the past year before it exploded.

“This is a breakthrough in our understanding of what massive stars are doing moments before they die,” Wynn Jacobson-Galán, the study’s lead author, said in a statement. “Direct detection of pre-supernova activity in a red supergiant star has never been observed before in an ordinary Type II supernova. For the first time, we saw a red supergiant star explode.

The work — which was conducted at Northwestern before Jacobson-Galán moved to UC Berkeley — suggests that at least some stars must undergo significant changes in their internal structure, leading to the ejection of gas before they collapse.

The star was first detected in the summer of 2020 by the Pan-STARRS Institute of Astronomy at the University of Hawaii, and the group captured its flash a few months later.

The spectrum of supernova 2020tlf was taken using the Low-Resolution Imaging Spectrometer at the WM Keck Observatory.

The data revealed evidence of dense circumstellar material around the star at the time of the explosion.

Further monitoring after the explosion and additional data from the Keck Observatory’s Deep Imaging and Multi-Object Spectrograph and Near-Infrared Scale Spectrograph helped researchers determine that the red supergiant progenitor star of SN 2020tlf was 10 times more massive than the sun.

“I’m very excited about all the new ‘unknowns’ that have been unlocked by this discovery,” Jacobson-Galán said. “Detecting more events like SN 2020tlf will have a huge impact on how we define the final months of stellar evolution, uniting observers and theorists in the quest to solve the mystery of how massive stars pass last moments of their lives.

The study was supported by NASA, the National Science Foundation, the Heising-Simons Foundation, the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and Villum Fonden.

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