An international team of astronomers has observed the first example of a new
type of supernova. The discovery, confirming a prediction made four decades
ago, could lead to new insights into the life and death of stars. The work
was published on June 28, 2021, in Nature Astronomy.
“One of the main questions in astronomy is to compare how stars evolve and
how they die,” said Stefano Valenti, professor of physics and astronomy at
the University of California, Davis, and a member of the team that
discovered and described supernova 2018zd. “There are many links still
missing, so this is very exciting.”
There are two known types of supernova. A core-collapse supernova occurs
when a massive star, more than 10 times the mass of our sun, runs out of
fuel and its core collapses into a black hole or neutron star. A
thermonuclear supernova occurs when a white dwarf star — the remains of a
star up to eight times the mass of the sun — explodes.
In 1980, Ken’ichi Nomoto of the University of Tokyo predicted a third type
called an electron capture supernova.
What keeps most stars from collapsing under their own gravity is the energy
produced in their central core. In an electron capture supernova, as the
core runs out of fuel, gravity forces electrons in the core into their
atomic nuclei, causing the star to collapse in on itself.
Evidence from late spectrum
Supernova 2018zd was detected in March 2018, about three hours after the
explosion. Archival images from the Hubble Space Telescope and Spitzer Space
Telescope showed a faint object that was likely the star before explosion.
The supernova is relatively close to Earth, at a distance of about 31
million light years in galaxy NGC2146.
The team, led by Daichi Hiramatsu, graduate student at UC Santa Barbara and
Las Cumbres Observatory, collected data on the supernova over the next two
years. Astronomers from UC Davis, including Valenti and graduate students
Azalee Bostroem and Yize Dong, contributed a spectral analysis of the
supernova two years after the explosion, one of the lines of evidence
demonstrating that 2018zd was an electron capture supernova.
“We had a really exquisite, really complete dataset following its rise and
fade,” Bostroem said. That included very late data collected with the
10-meter telescope at the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, Dong added.
Theory predicts that electron capture supernovae should show an unusual
stellar chemical spectrum years later.
“The Keck spectra we observed clearly confirm that SN 2018zd is our best
candidate to be an electron capture supernova,” Valenti said.
The late spectrum data were not the only piece of the puzzle. The team
looked through all published data on supernovae, and found that while some
had a few of the indicators predicted for electron capture supernovae, only
SN 2018zd had all six: an apparent progenitor star of the Super-Asymptotic
Giant Branch (SAGB) type; strong pre-supernova mass loss; an unusual stellar
chemical spectrum; a weak explosion; little radioactivity; and a
neutron-rich core.
“We started by asking ‘what’s this weirdo?’ Then we examined every aspect of
SN 2018zd and realized that all of them can be explained in the
electron-capture scenario,” Hiramatsu said.
Explaining the Crab Nebula
The new discoveries also illuminate some mysteries of the most famous
supernova of the past. In A.D. 1054 a supernova occurred in the Milky Way.
According to Chinese records it was so bright that it could be seen in the
daytime for 23 days, and at night for nearly two years. The resulting
remnant — the Crab Nebula — has been studied in great detail. It was
previously the best candidate for an electron capture supernova, but this
was uncertain partly because the explosion happened nearly a thousand years
ago. The new result increases the confidence that the event that formed the
Crab Nebula was an electron capture supernova.
“I am very pleased that the electron capture supernova was finally
discovered, which my colleagues and I predicted to exist and have a
connection to the Crab Nebula 40 years ago. This is a wonderful case of the
combination of observations and theory,” said Nomoto, who is also an author
on the current paper.
Reference:
“The electron-capture origin of supernova 2018zd” by Daichi Hiramatsu, D.
Andrew Howell, Schuyler D. Van Dyk, Jared A. Goldberg, Keiichi Maeda,
Takashi J. Moriya, Nozomu Tominaga, Ken’ichi Nomoto, Griffin Hosseinzadeh,
Iair Arcavi, Curtis McCully, Jamison Burke, K. Azalee Bostroem, Stefano
Valenti, Yize Dong, Peter J. Brown, Jennifer E. Andrews, Christopher
Bilinski, G. Grant Williams, Paul S. Smith, Nathan Smith, David J. Sand,
Gagandeep S. Anand, Chengyuan Xu, Alexei V. Filippenko, Melina C. Bersten,
Gastón Folatelli, Patrick L. Kelly, Toshihide Noguchi and Koichi Itagaki, 28
June 2021, Nature Astronomy.
Tags:
Space & Astrophysics