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martyb [soylentnews.org] writes:

From the Illudium-PU36-explosive-space-modulator-is-a-firecracker dept

First Optical Detection of a Shock Breakout From a Type II-P Supernova [nd.edu]:

For the first time, a “shock breakout” in an exploding supergiant star has been discovered at visible wavelengths.

... Supernovae like these — known as Type II — begin when the internal furnace of a star runs out of nuclear fuel, causing its core to collapse as gravity takes over. Stars 10 to 20 times the mass of our sun often expand to supergiants before ending their lives as supernovae. ...When these massive stars run out of fuel in their center, their core collapses down to a neutron star and a supersonic shock wave is sent out. When the shock wave reaches the surface of the star, a bright flash of light, called a “shock breakout,” is predicted.

In 2011, two of these massive red supergiants exploded while in Kepler’s view. The first, KSN 2011a, is nearly 300 times the size of our sun and a mere 700 million light years from Earth. The second, KSN 2011d, is roughly 500 times the size of our sun and some 1.2 billion light years away.

“The flash from a breakout should last about an hour, so you have to be very lucky or continuously stare at millions of stars just to catch one flash," said [lead astronomer] [Peter] Garnavich [nd.edu].

Understanding the physics of these explosions allows scientists to better understand how the seeds of chemical complexity and life itself have been scattered in space and time in the Milky Way galaxy.

Here is a video animation [youtu.be] that illustrates a shock breakout. The research paper has been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal and can be found at: http://arxiv.org/abs/1603.05657 [arxiv.org].

KSN 2011d is so large that it would take light nearly 20 minutes to travel from its center to its outer edge — the orbits of Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars would all very easily fit within it.

Original Submission