Galactic explosion offers astrophysicists new insight into the cosmos
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Loading... - Christopher ROBINSON
- 07 Mar 2023
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Study reveals new details about the universe's chemical formation
Using data from the James Webb Space Telescope's first year of interstellar observation, an international team of researchers was able to serendipitously view an exploding supernova in a faraway spiral galaxy.
The study, published recently in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, provides new infrared measurements of one of the brightest galaxies in our cosmic neighborhood, NGC 1566, also known as the Spanish Dancer. Located about 40 million light-years away from Earth, the galaxy's extremely active center has led it to become especially popular with scientists aiming to learn more about how star-forming nebulae form and evolve.
In this case, scientists were able to survey a Type 1a supernova -- the explosion of a carbon-oxygen white dwarf star, which Michael Tucker, a fellow at the Center for Cosmology and AstroParticle Physics at The Ohio State University and a co-author of the study, said researchers caught by mere chance while studying NGC 1566.
"White dwarf explosions are important to the field of cosmology, as astronomers often use them as indicators of distance," said Tucker. "They also produce a huge chunk of the iron group elements in the universe, such as iron, cobalt and nickel."
The research was made possible thanks to the PHANGS-JWST Survey, which, due to its vast inventory of star cluster measurements, was used to create a reference dataset to study in nearby galaxies. By analyzing images taken of the supernova's core, Tucker and co-author Ness Mayker Chen, a graduate student in astronomy at Ohio State who led the study, aimed to investigate how certain chemical elements are emitted into the surrounding cosmos after an explosion.
For instance, light elements like hydrogen and helium were formed during the big bang, but heavier elements can be created only through the thermonuclear reactions that happen inside supernovas. Understanding how these stellar reactions affect the distribution of iron elements around the cosmos could give researchers deeper insight into the chemical formation of the universe, said Tucker. Read More…
