How giant stars die: Astronomers long suspected that Wolf-Rayet stars violently self-destructed as supernovas, the most powerful stellar explosions in the universe. These outbursts are bright enough to momentarily outshine their entire galaxies, and enrich galaxies with heavy elements that eventually become the building blocks for planets and life. However, the gigantic amounts of matter these stars blow out usually obscure them completely, so scientists werent sure how they form, live and die. Finding what kind of star exploded, after it already exploded, is, of course, a hard problem, since the explosion destroys much of the information. Some researchers even raised doubts as to whether Wolf-Rayet stars detonated as supernovas at all. Some modelers predict that massive Wolf-Rayet stars will collapse into a black hole quietly, without making a luminous supernova. Now, for the first time, scientists have direct confirmation that a Wolf-Rayet star died in a supernova. The researchers focused on a supernova named SN 2013cu, which exploded about 360 million light-years away from Earth in the Bootes constellation. This explosion was a Type IIb supernova, meaning it took place after the core of its star ran out of fuel, collapsing into an extraordinarily dense nugget in a fraction of a second and rebounding with a blast outward. What is left over after such supernovas is either a neutron star or a black hole.
Posted on: Thu, 22 May 2014 05:35:05 +0000
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