![]() Both Filippenko and Nugent are also co-authors on the Nature paper.Įlusive Signatures Illuminated in a Flash of Light It’s refreshing that we can now say that Wolf-Rayet stars are responsible, at least in some cases,” says Alex Filippenko, Professor of Astronomy at UC Berkeley. “When I identified the first example of a Type IIb supernova in 1987, I dreamed that someday we would have direct evidence of what kind of star exploded. For the first time, we can directly point to an observation and say that this type of Wolf-Rayet star leads to this kind of Type IIb supernova,” says Peter Nugent, who heads Berkeley Lab’s Computational Cosmology Center (C3) and leads the Berkeley contingent of the iPTF collaboration. He is also the lead author of a recently published Nature paper on this finding. We are moving towards real-time studies of supernovae,” says Gal-Yam, an astrophysicist in the Weizmann Institute’s Department of Particle Physics and Astrophysics. “Newly developed observational capabilities now enable us to study exploding stars in ways we could only dream of before. These observations are providing valuable insights into the life and death of the progenitor Wolf-Rayet. They then triggered ground- and space-based telescopes to observe the event approximately 5.7 hours and 15 hours after it self-destructed. Using the iPTF pipeline, researchers at Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science led by Avishay Gal-Yam caught supernova SN 2013cu within hours of its explosion. ![]() This very hot, young supernova marked the explosive death of a massive star in that distant galaxy.įor the first time ever, scientists have direct confirmation that a Wolf-Rayet star-sitting 360 million light years away in the Bootes constellation-died in a violent explosion known as a Type IIb supernova. ![]() A star in a distant galaxy explodes as a supernova: while observing a galaxy known as UGC 9379 (left image from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey SDSS) located about 360 million light years away from Earth, the team discovered a new source of bright blue light (right, marked with an arrow image from the 60-inch robotic telescope at Palomar Observatory).
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