New research dives into details of supernova

Astronomers have made the best determination of the power of a supernova explosion long after it was visible from Earth. This technique, using X-ray and optical observations, may help reveal the details of how some stars come to a cataclysmic death

LIVERMORE, Calif. – Astronomers have made the best determination of the power of a supernova explosion long after it was visible from Earth. This technique, using X-ray and optical observations, may help reveal the details of how some stars come to a cataclysmic death.

Using data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Gemini Observatory and ESA’s XMM-Newton Observatory, two teams of international researchers, including Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientists Kem Cook and Sergei Nikolaev, determined that a supernova that occurred about 400 years ago was unusually bright and energetic.

By observing the remnant of a supernova and a light echo from the initial explosion, the teams have established the validity of a new method for studying a type of supernova that produces most of the iron in the universe. The two teams of researchers studied the supernova remnant and the supernova light echo that are located in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a small galaxy about 160,000 light years from Earth

This is the first time two methods – X-ray observations of the supernova remnant and optical observations of the expanding light echoes – have been combined to study a supernova. Until now, scientists could only estimate the power of explosions from the light seen soon after a star exploded, or from remnants that are several hundred years old, but not from both.

And the results could have implications in identifying similar incidents in the Milky Way.

“Classifying outbursts associated with centuries-old remnants is likely to be successful in providing new constraints on additional LMC supernovae as well as their historical counterparts in our own galaxy,” Cook said.

In 2004, scientists used Chandra to determine that a supernova remnant, known as SNR 0509-67.5 in the LMC, was a Type Ia supernova, which is caused by a white dwarf star in a binary system that reaches a critical mass and explodes.

In the new optical study, an estimate of the explosion’s power came from studying the original light of the explosion as it travels through space. Just as sound bounces off walls of a canyon, light waves create an echo by bouncing off dust clouds in space. The light from these echoes travels a longer path than the light that travels straight toward us, and so can be seen hundreds of years after the original explosion.

"People didn’t have advanced telescopes to study supernovas when they went off hundreds of years ago," said Armin Rest of Harvard University, who led the light echo observations. "But we’ve done the next best thing by looking around the site of the explosion and constructing an action replay of it."