Explosive material: The making of a supernova

This insight into the conditions leading up to core collapse arose from a unique collaboration called the Palomar Transient Factory, a fully automated sky survey using the telescopes of the Palomar observatory in southern California. Astrophysicists halfway around the globe, in Israel, are on call for the telescope, which scans the California night sky for the sudden appearance of new astronomical "transients" that were not visible before -- which can indicate new supernovae. In October, 2013, Dr. Ofer Yaron, in the Weizmann Institute's Particle Physics and Astrophysics Department, got the message that a potential supernova had been sighted, and he immediately alerted Dr. Dan Perley who was observing that night with the Keck telescope in Hawaii, and NASA's Swift Satellite. At Keck, the researchers soon began to record the spectra of the event. Because they had started observing only three hours into the blast, the picture the team managed to assemble was the most detailed ever of the core collapse process. "We had x-rays, ultraviolet, four spectroscopic measurements from between six and ten hours post-explosion to work with," says Yaron.

In a study recently published in Nature Physics, Yaron, Weizmann Institute researchers Profs. Avishay Gal-Yam and Eran Ofek, and their teams, together with researchers from the California Institute of Technology and other institutes in the United States, Denmark, Sweden, Ireland, Israel and the UK, analyzed the unique dataset they had collected from the very first days of the supernova.

The time window was crucial: It enabled the team to detect material that had surrounded the star pre- explosion, as it heated up and became ionized and was eventually overtaken by the expanding cloud of stellar matter. Comparing the observed early spectra and light-curve data with existing models, accompanied by later radio observations, led the researchers to conclude that the explosion was preceded by a period of instability lasting for around a year. This instability caused material to be expelled from the surface layers of the star, forming the circumstellar shell of gas that was observed in the data. Because this was found to be a relatively standard type II supernova, the researchers believe that the instability they revealed may be a regular warm up act to the immanent explosion.

"We still don't really understand the process by which a star explodes as a supernova," says Yaron, "These findings are raising new questions, for example, about the final trigger that tips the star from merely unstable to explosive. With our globe-spanning collaboration that enables us to alert various telescopes to train their sights on the event, we are getting closer and closer to understanding what happens in that instant, how massive stars end their life and what leads up to the final explosion."