When a distant massive star died, the supernova provided astronomers with a glimpse into the inner workings of how stars perish.
The SN 2013cu supernova was located in the galaxy UGC 9379, approximately 360 million light-years from Earth. The explosion is clearly seen in before and after pictures taken of the stellar family.
The most massive of all stars explodes in a tremendous blast, signaling the end of its life. These massive blasts create atoms that can be formed in no other process. Every atom more complex than iron, with 26 protons, was formed in the blast of a supernova. Supernovas can be powerful enough to briefly outshine hundreds of billions of other stars in its galaxy.
Wolf-Rayet stars are among the largest of these bodies. They are 20 times the mass of our sun, and burn white-hot, five times the temperature of our own star. Just a few hundred of these titanic stars have ever been discovered by astronomers.
While they are in the prime of their existence, the stars display a magnificent solar wind, pushing star matter equal to the mass of the Earth off the star each year.
The material can block the light and data coming from the stars as they explode. This has left several questions unanswered concerning the process by which Wolf-Rayet stars go supernova. Some physicists believed these most-massive of all stars never erupt in a supernova explosion, but instead "quietly" forms black holes.
Avishay Gal-Yam of the Weizmann Institute in Israel studied data from the entire event. He examined the chemical composition of the area surrounding the star, looking for carbon, oxygen and nitrogen in the material expelled from the body.
"Scientists believe that such stars are layered like onions: The heaviest elements, for example iron, are located in the core while the lighter ones make up the outermost layers. At the stars' outermost edges are stellar winds that blow the material found there out to space. At some point in the star's life, the lightweight hydrogen making up its outer layer runs out, and it begins tossing out its helium, oxygen, carbon and nitrogen," Gal-Yam said.
Nitrogen is composed from seven protons, an odd number. Because of this, it cannot be formed from two copies of the same atom. The element could be created from three heliums carrying two protons a piece with one proton from a hydrogen nucleus. By studying this layer of the stellar body, astronomers hope to learn about the layers of the star beneath the surface.
The study showed these massive stars clearly do become supernovas.
Study of the massive supernova was published in the journal Nature.
