Space Telescope Captures ‘Flash’ Of An Exploding StarRob Waugh's Yahoo Blog 6 hours ago
A NASA space telescope has captured the violent death of an exploding star in visible light for the first time.
The Kepler space telescope captured the first, brilliant flash of an exploding star’s shockwave - known as the ‘shock breakout’.
The explosive death of this star, a red supergiant called KSN 2011d, took 14 days - but the ‘shock breakout’ lasts just 20 minutes, and astronomers have hailed the find as a milestone.
The star is located 700 million light years from Earth - so we’re actually seeing an explosion which happened long, long ago.
‘In order to see something that happens on timescales of minutes, like a shock breakout, you want to have a camera continuously monitoring the sky,’ said Peter Garnavich of the University of Indiana.
‘You don’t know when a supernova is going to go off, and Kepler’s vigilance allowed us to be a witness as the explosion began.’
Supernovae like these — known as Type II — begin when the internal furnace of a star runs out of nuclear fuel causing its core to collapse as gravity takes over.
As the supergiant star goes supernova, the energy traveling from the core reaches the surfaces with a burst of light that is 130,000,000 times brighter than the sun.
The star continues to explode and grow reaching maximum brightness that is about 1,000,000,000 times brighter than the sun.
http://news.yahoo.com/space-telescope-captures-flash-of-an-exploding-084347894.html
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