A fading supernova 650 million light years away
Click for original image.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in March 2024, and shows the fading blue light of a supernova that was first discovered by another survey telescope six weeks earlier. The galaxy, dubbed LEDA 22057, is estimated to be about 650 million light years away.
The supernova is the bright spot in the galaxy’s southeast quadrant near the edge of the galaxy’s bright body. From today’s caption release:
SN 2024PI is classified as a Type Ia supernova. This type of supernova requires a remarkable object called a white dwarf, the crystallised core of a star with a mass less than about eight times the mass of the Sun. When a star of this size uses up the supply of hydrogen in its core, it balloons into a red giant, becoming cool, puffy and luminous. Over time, pulsations and stellar winds cause the star to shed its outer layers, leaving behind a white dwarf and a colourful planetary nebula. White dwarfs can have surface temperatures higher than 100,000 degrees and are extremely dense, packing roughly the mass of the Sun into a sphere the size of Earth.
While nearly all of the stars in the Milky Way will one day evolve into white dwarfs — this is the fate that awaits the Sun some five billion years in the future — not all of them will explode as Type Ia supernovae. For that to happen, the white dwarf must be a member of a binary star system. When a white dwarf syphons material from a stellar partner, the white dwarf can become too massive to support itself. The resulting burst of runaway nuclear fusion destroys the white dwarf in a supernova explosion that can be seen many galaxies away.
The rate in which this supernova fades will help astronomers untangle the processes that cause these gigantic explosions. Though the caption makes it sound as if we know how this happens, we really don’t. There are a lot of assumptions and guesses involved in the description above, based on the limited knowledge astronomers have gathered over the past few centuries looking at many supernovae many millions of light years away.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon. from any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Click for original image.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in March 2024, and shows the fading blue light of a supernova that was first discovered by another survey telescope six weeks earlier. The galaxy, dubbed LEDA 22057, is estimated to be about 650 million light years away.
The supernova is the bright spot in the galaxy’s southeast quadrant near the edge of the galaxy’s bright body. From today’s caption release:
SN 2024PI is classified as a Type Ia supernova. This type of supernova requires a remarkable object called a white dwarf, the crystallised core of a star with a mass less than about eight times the mass of the Sun. When a star of this size uses up the supply of hydrogen in its core, it balloons into a red giant, becoming cool, puffy and luminous. Over time, pulsations and stellar winds cause the star to shed its outer layers, leaving behind a white dwarf and a colourful planetary nebula. White dwarfs can have surface temperatures higher than 100,000 degrees and are extremely dense, packing roughly the mass of the Sun into a sphere the size of Earth.
While nearly all of the stars in the Milky Way will one day evolve into white dwarfs — this is the fate that awaits the Sun some five billion years in the future — not all of them will explode as Type Ia supernovae. For that to happen, the white dwarf must be a member of a binary star system. When a white dwarf syphons material from a stellar partner, the white dwarf can become too massive to support itself. The resulting burst of runaway nuclear fusion destroys the white dwarf in a supernova explosion that can be seen many galaxies away.
The rate in which this supernova fades will help astronomers untangle the processes that cause these gigantic explosions. Though the caption makes it sound as if we know how this happens, we really don’t. There are a lot of assumptions and guesses involved in the description above, based on the limited knowledge astronomers have gathered over the past few centuries looking at many supernovae many millions of light years away.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon. from any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
For the mass majority of human existence and recorded history on planet earth this picture and the information gleaned from it is incongruous.