Can Astronomers Predict Which Stars Are About to Explode as Supernovae?
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Loading... - Chang Chen
- 21 Sep 2022
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In a recent study submitted to High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena, a team of researchers from Japan discuss strategies to observe, and possibly predict precursor signatures for an explosion from Local Type II and Galactic supernovae (SNe). This study has the potential to help us better understand both how and when supernovae could occur throughout the universe, with supernovae being the plural form of supernova (SN). But just how important is it to detect supernovae before they actually happen?
“From my perspective it is important in two aspects,” said Dr. Daichi Tsuna, who is an astrophysicist at the Research Center for the Early Universe at the Univerisy of Tokyo, and lead author of the study. “First, while we know that supernovae (SNe) are explosions signaling the death of massive stars, what happens near the end of its life is still a mystery. In fact, SN precursors, suggested by recent observational works, are not predicted from the standard theory of stellar evolution. Our paper claims that we can probe this precursor in depth by future observations, which can help deepen our understanding of stellar evolution and refine the existing theory. Second, finding a SN precursor would allow a very early alert of a near-future SN, and will help extend the available time frame to coordinate multi-messenger (light, neutrinos, and gravitational waves) observations.”
For the study, the researchers utilized the open-source code CHIPS (Complete History of Interaction-Powered Supernovae) to create a theoretical model for such a discharge from a red supergiant star’s mass eruption. This is intriguing since the star Betelguese, which in 2019 was observed to dim in brightness, sparking discussions about it possibly going supernovae, is also a red supergiant star. As it turns out, Betelguese is nearing the end of its life, but a 2021 study said it isn’t slated to explode for another 100,000 years. But what implications could this research have for Betelguese?
“Betelgeuse is a red supergiant, which is exactly the kind of star we have studied in this paper,” explains Dr. Tsuna. “Thus, if Betelgeuse were to explode very soon, it may display this kind of precursor emission just before the SN. Since Betelgeuse is very close to us, neutrino detectors may find neutrinos emitted as early as days before the SN. We can do multi-messenger astronomy even before the SN explosion!” Read More...
