Indian astronomers have tracked a rare supernova explosion and traced it to be one of the hottest kind of stars. They are highly luminous objects a thousand times that of the Sun. They are called Wolf Rayet Stars and these are highly energetic explosion.
A team of astronomers from Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational Sciences in Nainital, Uttarakhand along with international collaborators conducted the optical monitoring of one such stripped-envelope supernova. According to Ministry of Science and Technology, the supernova was called SN 2015dj. The supernova was hosted in the galaxy NGC 7371 which was spotted in 2015.
One of the hottest star
The astronomers calculated the mass of the star that collapsed to form the supernova and the geometry of its ejection. The study has been published in The Astrophysical Journal. The scientists also found that the original star was a combination of two stars one of them being a massive WR star and another star much less in mass than the Sun. Supernovas are highly energetic explosions in the Universe releasing an enormous amount of energy. Long-term monitoring of these transients opens the door to understand the nature of the exploding star as well as the explosion properties. It can also help enumerate the number of massive stars.
Similarly, NASA has shared an image of a striking bluish green supernova on the occasion of St.Patrick’s Day that was formed after a massive star exploded in a nearby galaxy called the Small Magellanic Cloud. The X-rays in the mesmerizing green, a colour symbolic of Irish rebellion during the St. Patrick day was emitted nearly 200,000 light-years away in the satellite galaxy of the milky way, according to NASA. In an Instagram post, the space agency wrote that a cosmic explosion sent the debris field abloom, creating the greenish radiations in a spectacular display of vibrant filaments.
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