Ten billion years ago, long before the formation of our solar system, a gargantuan explosion released large amounts of highly energetic light. A star died in a dazzling supernova, and although it happened a long time ago, the flash was only seen in 2016 and disappeared shortly thereafter. But if you missed it, don’t worry – we’ll be able to see the explosion again.
The supernova was seen with the Hubble Space Telescope by a team of French, American and Danish researchers. Analyzing Hubble’s infrared data for a given portion of space, the team found that three light sources seen in 2016 had disappeared in 2019. In the end it turned out that all three light sources came from a single explosion, but light took different routes to get to the Hubble lens. Excitingly, another flash point of lightning is expected to reach Earth in 2037, giving or taking a couple of years, according to team calculations. The investigation was published today in Nature Astronomy.
The reappearance of the supernova, located in the galaxy MRG-M0138, is due to a principle called the gravitational lens. When photons (light particles) are emitted from some cosmic source, they shoot into space in all directions, traveling in a straight line. But when they pass a massive object in its transit, photons can bend around this structure.
“It’s like a train that has to go down to a deep valley and go up again,” Steven Rodney, an astronomer at the University of South Carolina and lead author of the recent article, told Gizmodo. “It slows you in and out, which adds about 20 more years to your roughly ten billion-year journey.”
G / O Media may receive a commission
In this case, the light generated by the supernova (called 2016jka, also known as Requiem) bent around a cluster of galaxies called MACS J0138. Some paths around this massive structure are longer than others. Therefore, what was an instantaneous release of light into the ancient universe arrives on Earth at different times, separated by years.
The 2016 observation included three light sources that appeared in a specific region of space for about 100 days. (“Like a photo of a baby and two photos of a distressed teenager [supernova]”Rodney said.) These flashes had disappeared in 2019, but the team estimated that more light will come from this old explosion in about 16 years.
These long-range measurements of the gravitational lens could help astrophysicists draw a pearl at Hubble’s constant perplexity, the number that describes the speed of the universe’s expansion and that they can be measured in two different ways, giving different values. Scientists are not quite sure why the methods give different values, but measuring cases of gravitational lenses like the one that works in the Requiem supernova provide more data to the problem.
“Understanding the structure of the universe will be one of the top priorities of major Earth-based observatories and international space organizations over the next decade,” said Gabriel Brammer, co-author of the paper and astrophysicist at the Cosmic Dawn Center , at the University of Copenhagen Press release. “Studies planned for the future will cover much of the sky and are expected to reveal dozens or even hundreds of rare gravitational lenses with supernovae such as the Requiem SN. Accurate measurements of the delays from these sources provide unique and reliable determinations of cosmic expansion and may even help reveal the properties of dark matter and dark energy. ”
The next Roman Space Telescope is being launched for this exact purpose: to investigate dark energy by measuring the distance and motion of supernovae that occur from white dwarf explosions, which the recent research team suspects is the Requiem. The Roman telescope essentially uses the brightness of these supernovae to investigate the variability of the Hubble constant and smell what causes the numbers to fluctuate.
JoInterestingly, Brammer told Gizmodo that theoretically it is possible that by looking at where they hope to see the next flash of light arrive around 2037, scientists could see the white dwarf in its pre-supernova state. “We could, in principle, observe this faint star today,” Brammer said, “although I estimate at a few orders of magnitude that a telescope a billion times larger than Hubble would be needed.–a diameter of 2,000 kilometers—do that. ”It doesn’t seem too practical, but hey, an astrophysicist can dream.
More: Astronomers believe they have seen a rare type of supernova that is only predicted to exist