Stars finish their life in a most dramatic style. They explode in an epic supernova, throwing out dust and gas at tremendous speeds. Scientists often see the remnants of such supernovas, but recently the Hubble Space Telescope found something very rare when it snapped a star going supernova.
Supernova SN 2020fqv lies in the two interacting Butterfly Galaxies, which is 60 million light-years away from our planet. It was first spotted in April 2020 by the Zwicky Transient Facility at the Palomar Observatory when the star was at an initial stage of a supernova, and the Hubble team turned their attention to it.
Rare opportunity for astronomers
“We used to talk about supernova work like we were crime scene investigators, where we would show up after the fact and try to figure out what happened to that star,” explained team leader Ryan Foley of the University of California, Santa Cruz. “This is a different situation because we really know what’s going on and we actually see the death in real-time.”
The telescope managed to catch a glimpse of the material around the star known as circumstellar material, just hours after the supernova occurred. This is a very rare opportunity for scientists to study what happened to the star during the end of its life, as this material can only be seen through telescopes for a short duration.
Hunting star about to go supernova
Astronomers managed to build up a picture of what happened to the star in its final years using the data from NASA’s exoplanet-hunting Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which was also observing the region.
“Now we have this whole story about what’s happening to the star in the years before it died, through the time of death, and then the aftermath of that,” said Foley. “This is really the most detailed view of stars like this in their last moments and how they explode.”
Studying this star could help astronomers learn more about which stars might be on the verge of going supernova. This will allow them to shift their attention to such stars before they explode.
