Astronomers have used a new type of extreme supernova in which a massive star was stripped right “down to the bone” to better understand the process of stellar life and death.
When other massive stars die in supernova explosions, astronomers detect strong signals of light elements like hydrogen and helium that existed at the surface of the star. However, in this supernova, designated SN2021yfj and located 2.2 billion light-years from Earth, this team found a different chemical signature. This contained traces of heavier elements like silicon, sulfur, and argon that originate from deeper within the progenitor star.
If dying stars have onion-like structures with lighter elements at their surfaces and heavier elements toward their iron cores as astrophysicists currently theorize, then this star must have somehow lost its outer layers, thus exposing inner silicon and sulfur-rich layers before it “went nova.” This would not only confirm the layered structure of massive stars, but it also give stellar scientists a rare glimpse at the interior of a star prior to it exploding in a supernova.
“This is the first time we have seen a star that was essentially stripped to the bone,” team leader and Northwestern University scientist Steve Schulze said in a statement. “It shows us how stars are structured and proves that stars can lose a lot of material before they explode. Not only can they lose their outermost layers, but they can be completely stripped all the way down and still produce a brilliant explosion that we can observe from very, very far distances.”
SN2021yfj, first spotted in September 2021 by the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), suggests that while our models of stellar life and death and star structure may be correct, they may not fully describe the explosive death throes of all stars.
“This event quite literally looks like nothing anyone has ever seen before,” Northwestern University researcher and team member Adam Miller said. “It was almost so weird that we thought maybe we didn’t observe the correct object. This star is telling us that our ideas and theories for how stars evolve are too narrow. It’s not that our textbooks are incorrect, but they clearly do not fully capture everything produced in nature.
“There must be more exotic pathways for a massive star to end its life that we hadn’t considered.”
The team’s research was published on Wednesday…
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