{"id":287738,"date":"2025-11-12T20:36:07","date_gmt":"2025-11-12T20:36:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/287738\/"},"modified":"2025-11-12T20:36:07","modified_gmt":"2025-11-12T20:36:07","slug":"this-is-what-a-star-looks-like-just-26-hours-after-it-explodes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/287738\/","title":{"rendered":"This Is What a Star Looks Like Just 26 Hours After It Explodes"},"content":{"rendered":"

Astronomers have captured a first-of-its-kind image of a massive dying star.<\/p>\n

Just 26 hours after the supernova SN 2024ggi was first detected in April 2024, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) pointed its Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile at the dramatic astronomical event. Supernovas<\/a> are the explosive deaths of stars, and ESO\u2019s VLT managed to capture this one in its earliest moments\u2014just as the blast was rupturing through the star\u2019s surface. This achievement reveals, for the first time, the supernova\u2019s shape at its earliest, ephemeral stage.<\/p>\n

This is great news for researchers because \u201cthe geometry of a supernova explosion provides fundamental information on stellar evolution and the physical processes leading to these cosmic fireworks,\u201d Yi Yang, an astronomer at Tsinghua University and co-author of a study published today in Science Advances, explained in an ESO statement<\/a>.<\/p>\n

An explosive mystery <\/p>\n

As iconic as supernovas are, researchers continue to debate exactly how massive stars\u2014stars with over eight times the mass of the sun\u2014go supernova. When a massive star runs out of fuel, its core collapses and its surrounding shells of mass fall inward before bouncing off in a rebound shock that spreads outward and releases a huge amount of energy when it breaks through the star\u2019s surface. That\u2019s when the supernova becomes bright and observable.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe death of massive stars is triggered by an infall-induced bounce shock that disrupts the star. How such a shock is launched and propagates through the star is a decades-long puzzle,\u201d Yang and his colleagues wrote in the study. At just 22 million light-years away, in the galaxy NGC 3621, supernova SN 2024ggi is not far by astronomical standards. Before exploding, it was a red supergiant star with 12 to 15 times the mass of the Sun and a radius 500 times larger.<\/p>\n

\"TheThe NGC3621 galaxy with a circle identifying the supernova Sn2024ggi. \u00a9 European Southern Observatory <\/p>\n

The team was able to capture the short-lived \u201cbreakout\u201d shape\u2014before the eruption interacts with surrounding material\u2014for the very first time with a technique called spectropolarimetry. The technique \u201cdelivers information about the geometry of the explosion that other types of observation cannot provide,\u201d explained Lifan Wang, co-author of the study and an astronomer at Texas A&M University.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re imagining a detailed photograph of a colorful explosion, that\u2019s not what we\u2019re talking about here (the feature image up top is an artist\u2019s interpretation based on the new data). The supernova appears as a single point, but the researchers were able to reconstruct its geometry from the polarization of its light. Simply put, polarization is a property of light particles that, in certain cases, allows researchers to infer the shape of the light-emitting star or supernova.<\/p>\n

Olive-shaped <\/p>\n

The team found that the initial blast was olive-shaped, and as the material propagated outward and hit matter around the star, it flattened but maintained the same axis of symmetry. \u201cThese findings suggest a common physical mechanism that drives the explosion of many massive stars, which manifests a well-defined axial symmetry and acts on large scales,\u201d said Yang.<\/p>\n

Thanks to these results, astronomers can now rule out a number of the current supernova models and improve others, honing in on the exact nature of these powerful explosions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Astronomers have captured a first-of-its-kind image of a massive dying star. Just 26 hours after the supernova SN…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":287739,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[6626,79,151382,49782],"class_list":{"0":"post-287738","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-astronomy","9":"tag-science","10":"tag-supernovas","11":"tag-very-large-telescope"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287738","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=287738"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287738\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/287739"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=287738"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=287738"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=287738"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}