Watch | With help from a 'cosmic hand', scientists capture death of a star

New Delhi, India

Astronomers successfully observed and captured a supernova blast in space over 14 years. Now, it has given them fascinating insights into the supernovas that mark the end of a star’s life-cycle.

With images from over a decade, astronomers observed the supernova in space as it exploded with speeds of up to 4,000 kilometres per second (2,485 miles).

What is a supernova? How far is this one from Earth?

They observed the remains of a supernova called “MSH 15-52”, situated 17,000 light-years away from Earth. It is one of the youngest known legacies of a supernova within the Milky Way and flung its remains into a gas of cloud called “RCW 89”.

Approximately 1,700 years ago, the star began to die after running out of fuel. The death of stars in space is markedly violent, as they explode the outer material to collapse unto themselves.

Supernovas are essentially large-scale explosions that take place once the star runs out of energy and collapses into itself. For this reason, they are considered the largest explosions in space.

Once the star collapsed, it became a dead star called a “pulsar”, with densely packed neutrons and high speed rotations. Its rotational movement played an important role in the X-ray which shows the explosion in action. In a new study, scientists used images from 2004, 2008, and 2017-18 to note and understand the changes in the gas cloud “RCW 89”, which the supernova seems to be expanding.

How did the scientists study the supernova?

Scientists calculated the distance travelled by the dead star’s remnants to understand its reach. The scientist were literally guided by a “hand” to the explosion, the fingertip of which shows the MSH 15-52 meeting RCW 89. This meeting was rather fierce, causing movement at speeds of 4,000-5,000 kilometres per second.

According to ScienceAlert, the many knots visible in the graphic are cosmic entities made of magnesium and neon that formed in the star before the explosion. The slowest speed touched by the remnants is reportedly 1,000 kilometres per second!

Watch the movement below

But as the interaction between RCW 89 and MSH 15-52 slows down, so do these features, spanning a distance of 75-light years between the dead star and RCW 89, the gaseous cloud.

The material moving rapidly in the aftermath of the explosion passed a low-density bubble surrounding the dead star before merging into RCW 89, the study published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters claims. The findings prove that the understanding scientists have of any star’s death is true, that the collapse of the life-providing core triggers a supernova.

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