Supernovae are some of the most brilliant displays of power and beauty in the universe. Six weeks ago, astronomers found a particularly bright and peculiar supernova in a nearby galaxy and it left them stunned.
The supernova has been named as the SN 2014J and it is classified as a Type 1a supernova. A type 1a supernova can be found in binary systems composed of a white dwarf and another star. Due to the fact that type 1a supernovae produce consistent peaks of luminosity, they are often used as standard candles, or a cosmic yardstick so to speak, to measure astronomical distances.
The newly discovered supernova is located approximately 11.4 million light years away in a galaxy called the M82. In astronomical terms, this is a relatively short distance and the SN2014J is one of the brightest and closest supernovae ever seen from Earth.
The supernova was first discovered by a team of astronomers from the UK on Jan. 21. The stellar explosion would have been visible as much as a week earlier but had gone unnoticed until the UK team found it. Another team from the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) started hunting around for the supernova in the data from the Katzman Automatic Imaging Telescope (KAIT), they found an image dated Jan. 14 that was taken a mere 37 hours after the SN 2014J was first thought to have appeared. Another astronomer based in Japan was also able to gather data about the supernova almost purely by chance.
When all of the data on the SN 2014J was gathered an analyzed, scientists found something very odd. Aside from its impressive luminosity, the SN2014J also exhibit certain peculiarities that surprised scientists the world over. The new supernova brightened a lot faster than previous data from most Type 1a supernovae indicates. This is the second supernova to be found in recent years that exhibited this type of brightness. The first, a supernova named the SN 2013dy, was found by the KAIT last 2013.
Three years ago, a third Type 1a supernova referred to as SN2011fe was discovered by astronomers. Unlike the SN 20145 and the SN 2013dy however, this one was considered more "normal."
"Now, two of the three most recent and best-observed Type Ia supernovae are weird, giving us new clues to how stars explode," said Alex Filippenko, an astrophysicist from the UC Berkeley. "This may be teaching us something general about Type Ia supernovae that theorists need to understand. Maybe what we think of as 'normal' behavior for these supernovae is actually unusual, and this weird behavior is the new normal."
