Astronomers Find Nascent Exploding Star, 'Rosetta Stone' of All Supernovas

"A star located 60 million light years away went supernova last year, and astronomers managed to capture all stages of the stellar explosion using telescopes both on the ground and in space," reports Gizmodo. Long-time Slashdot reader spaceman375 shared Gizmodo's report: This awesome display of astronomical power has yielded a dataset of unprecedented proportions, with independent observations gathered before, during, and after the explosion. It's providing a rare multifaceted view of a supernova during its earliest phase of destruction. The resulting data should vastly improve our understanding of the processes involved when stars go supernova, and possibly lead to an early warning system in which astronomers can predict the timing of such events. "We used to talk about supernova work like we were crime scene investigators, where we would show up after the fact and try to figure out what happened to that star," Ryan Foley, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the leader of the investigation, explained in a press release. "This is a different situation, because we really know what's going on and we actually see the death in real time." Of course, it took 60 million years for the light from this supernova to reach Earth, so it's not exactly happening in "real time," but you get what Foley is saying... Observations of circumstellar material in close proximity to the star were made by Hubble just hours after the explosion, which, wow. The star shed this material during the past year, offering a unique perspective of the various stages that occur just prior to a supernova explosion. "We rarely get to examine this very close-in circumstellar material since it is only visible for a very short time, and we usually don't start observing a supernova until at least a few days after the explosion," said Samaporn Tinyanont, the lead author of the paper, which is set for publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. TESS managed to capture one image of the evolving system every 30 minutes, starting a few days before the explosion and ending several weeks afterward. Hubble joined in on the action a few hours after the explosion was first detected. Archival data dating back to the 1990s was also brought in for the analysis, resulting in an unprecedented multi-decade survey of a star on its way out... In the press release, the researchers referred to SN 2020fqv as the "Rosetta Stone of supernovas," as the new observations could translate hidden or poorly understood signals into meaningful data.

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