Author: Lisa Grossman / Source: Science News
For the first time, astronomers may have watched a massive stellar explosion give rise in real time to a superdense dead star called a neutron star.
New observations of supernova 2012au show charged oxygen and sulfur atoms fleeing the scene of the explosion at 2,300 kilometers per second. That suggests the shells of gas surrounding the dense remains of the original star are being lit up from within by a pulsar, a type of fast-spinning, radiation-spewing neutron star, researchers report September 12 in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
“It’s proof positive, a smoking gun for it,” says astrophysicist and study coauthor Dan Milisavljevic of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind. “We’ve seen this supernova from the explosion up until this transformation into the neutron star.” The find gives astronomers a chance to test theories about how supernovas and their aftermaths evolve in real time.
SN 2012au was spotted in 2012 in a galaxy about 77 million light-years away. The violent explosion marked the end of a massive star’s life, when the star could no longer fuse elements and produce enough energy to support its own weight (SN: 2/18/17, p. 20). The star’s core collapsed, producing a rebounding explosion of its outer layers of gas and, according to theory, leaving a dense neutron star as its final…
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