Talk about being in the right place at the right time.
In 2010, the The Hubble Space Telescope captured several images of the Abell 370 cluster of galaxies. In itself, this is not a revolutionary achievement. But a team of astronomers systematically examining Hubble’s archive images discovered something incredible in these images: the image of a baby supernova which exploded about 11.5 billion years ago, taken just hours after the star died.
The team, led by postdoctoral researcher Wenlei Chen from the University of Minnesota, was looking for gravitationally lensed transient events, and that’s exactly what a supernova is. It’s hidden behind Abell 370, but because light bends around the galaxy cluster due to its gravitational pull – an effect known as gravitational lens – we can actually see it from our point of view, albeit in a distorted way.
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By entering Hubble data into models and analyzing image details like brightness and color, Chen and his team determined that the original star that had become a supernova was likely a red supergiant with a diameter of about 530 times that of the sun.
They also determined that the first image in the series of three was taken by Hubble just six hours after the explosion after the core collapsed, with the second and third taken around 10 and 30 days after the explosion, respectively.
And because the supernova has a high red shift — the wavelengths of light are stretched and shifted towards the red side of the spectrum due to the expansion of the universe — Astronomers were able to estimate the age of the supernova at around 11.5 billion years, making it one of the oldest and most distant supernovae we have ever seen.
The team hopes their modeling will make it easier to study similar distant supernovae, should they be discovered. Those discovered, in turn, would advance the study of high-redshift stellar populations.
An article based on this research has been published in the journal Nature (opens in a new tab) today.
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