Tau.Neutrino said:
Supernova shows “the universe is crazier than science fiction”
Thanks to a worldwide network of 18 robotic telescopes, researchers led by the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) were able to catch a brief blue glow in the sky which, they say, was the result of a different kind of supernova explosion. The find reveals surprising information about the companion star next to the white dwarf that sparked the spectacle.
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“The most-popular theory of this kind of supernova event is that the two stars involved are both white dwarfs. However, the UCSB-led study shows that in the case of a supernova known as SN 2017cbv, that wasn’t the case.
When David Sand, an associate professor at the University of Arizona spotted the supernova on March 10, he noticed the brief blue glow. That’s because it’s believed that he was seeing the light from the supernova event just hours, or at most a day, after it happened. Minutes later, he activated the 18 robotic telescopes that are part of the Las Cumbres Observatory (LCO) network so that the supernova could be constantly monitored.
“With LCO’s ability to monitor the supernova every few hours, we were able to see the full extent of the rise and fall of the blue glow for the first time,” said lead author Griffin Hosseinzadeh, a UCSB graduate student. “Conventional telescopes would have had only a data point or two and missed it.”
After analyzing the blue light in a the UCSB-led study, the researchers concluded that the white dwarf at the center of the event had been grabbing matter from a star that was about 20 times bigger than our own sun – not from a white dwarf”
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Most popular, yes, but not correct. There are simply not enough white dwarf pairs to generate the observed number of supernovae of this kind. White dwarf pairs can spiral in only much more slowly than white dwarf plus normal star, limiting the number of possible supernovae from this source.
Nice observing work. In most cases the supernova is observed by different telescopes with different observing properties, which makes generating a time sequence of subtle events difficult if not impossible. This one used the same telescope every few hours.