KXANSupernova secret revealed as astronomers witness star’s final momentsEric Henrikson
Tue, December 2, 2025 at 9:58 AM EST
3 min read
The final moments of a supernova animated by the European Southern Observatory (Courtesy: ESO)AUSTIN (KXAN) — A star’s fleeting final moments are something to behold. As it dies, it collapses in on itself before exploding with such intensity that it produces more light than the entire galaxy for an instant.
For the first time, astronomers, part of the “Texas Mafia,” have witnessed the moment this fiery blast tears through a star’s surface and becomes a supernova.
“We have had hints going back 30 years now… that when these massive kinds of stars that we’re talking about, 10 times the mass of the sun, 20 times the mass of the sun, stars like Beetlejuice, blow up that they are not spherical,” said J. Craig Wheeler, an astronomer at the University of Texas at Austin and co-author of the new study published in Science Advances.
Wheeler said this supernova exploded upwards and downwards before its final explosion, becoming oblong in the process.
“It was an unprecedentedly early event, and then we followed it fairly frequently so we could see how it changed shape as it expanded,” Wheeler said.
The observation of this star, SN 2024ggi, came after some last-minute hustle from Yi Yang, lead author of the paper and a Texas A&M graduate.
“He had had just flown from China 14 hours overnight and landed just as a supernova was discovered. And he had the smarts to get in touch with the telescope operators in Europe and say, ‘we need to look at it now,'” Wheeler said.
He called the European Southern Observatory (ESO) and was able to get a last-minute redirect of a telescope to capture the moment of explosion.
How does a star die?Wheeler said there are a few different flavors of supernovas. He said massive stars undergo thermonuclear burning.
“So conversion of hydrogen, helium and then helium at the heavier elements like carbon and oxygen and then silicon kind of odd elements… And they finally make iron. And it turns out iron has a nuclear property that it cannot liberate any energy. It can only absorb energy.”
Once this iron core is formed, it starts to absorb energy, reducing the pressure keeping the star stable.
“The whole inner core collapses, and it’ll collapse down to make a neutron star. So something with the mass of a star and the size of Austin just a few miles across. And so you imagine this immense falling inward. There’s a tremendous amount of energy liberated in the process,” Wheeler said.
Understanding more about these events can help explain not just the life of a star, but all life in the universe.
“The elements in our bodies, the calcium in our bones and the iron in our blood all come out of exploding supernovae,” he said.
Next, the researchers hope to get more telescope time and continue to capture more observations of these dying stars.
“We don’t know when these are going to blow up. So you can’t really plan in advance. You’ve got to be ready to really react very quickly, which is what Yang did in a marvelous way,” Wheeler said.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/supernova-secret-revealed-astronomers-witness-145805272.html
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