Science
Hubble Captures Star’s Explosion 10 Million Light-Years Away—People Can’t Believe Their Eyes
After seeing a “amazing” star explosion captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, Redditors are going crazy.
Are you familiar with the astounding event known as a supernova? If not, you must comprehend that it is the result of a star’s transitional phase in its latter phases of evolution.
Material is ejected into space as a result of the enormous shockwave produced when a big star collapses.
The visual event of a supernova is actually relatively short, usually lasting only a few months to a year, in comparison to how old stars can be.
Because the explosion occurs so quickly and just a small percentage of stars in a galaxy have the potential to explode as a supernova, the likelihood of seeing one with the naked eye is only once in a lifetime.
watching rings of light, or “light echoes,” radiating out from the star in the months and years that follow is even more uncommon than watching a supernova.
Fortunately, this event has been captured on camera by the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), saving you the trouble.
Light echoes from a star in Centaurus A, a galaxy in the Centaurus constellation, approximately 13.05 million light years from Earth, have been recorded by the HST.
Astronomers watched this phenomena, called supernova SN 2016adj, for more than five years as it gradually faded away, according to Tech Fragments.
“The data set is remarkable and enabled us to produce very impressive coloured images and animations that exhibit the evolution of the light echoes over a five-year period,” said lead scientist Professor Maximillian Stritzinger of Aarhus University.
Redditors are going crazy over one particular light echo that the HST recorded over a period of 1.5 years, which has been transformed into a GIF.
“This might be one of my favorite images ever captured. That is so dang cool,” replied one.
A second typed, “Human beings have been around for at least 300,000 years and we all get to see this and so much more.”
“Think about that, it’s overwhelming. It’s our inheritance, cherish it!”
Someone else typed, “It’s hard to put into words how amazing it feels to observe this. What a privilege. Our species is capable of greatness.”
NASA claims that the light burst depicted in the GIF was moving at almost 10,000 miles per second.
Supernova Light Echo From Hubble (Credits: NASA/STScI/Judy Schmidt)
byu/Busy_Yesterday9455 inspaceporn
When scientists announced earlier this year that the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) had found one of the first “truly gargantuan” supernovas ever observed, supernovas once again made headlines.
It is estimated that this specific explosion, known as AT 2023adsv, shook the universe in a large, early galaxy about 2 billion years after the Big Bang.
Speaking about how JWST can move space exploration further, JADES team member and Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) researcher David Coulter said, “We don’t know how many [supernovas] the JWST will find but we can start to push to the beginning of these first stars and hope to see their explosions.”
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