![]() ![]() Though it may seem surprising that a star so close to a massive stellar explosion can survive, when you take into account the structure of stars, it makes sense. This ultimately caused the progenitor star to periodically expel massive shells of hydrogen gas, priming it for an epic explosion. Specifically, over the course of millions of years, the companion star robbed so much material from the primary star’s envelope that it created an instability. Since the outer region of a star is extremely efficient at transferring energy from the core outward, the absence of an envelope can have dramatic implications. In the case of SN 2001ig, the companion star is believed to have siphoned off nearly all of the hydrogen from the outer shell of the supernova’s progenitor. “Many of these binary pairs will interact and transfer gas from one star to the other when their orbits bring them close together.” “We know that the majority of massive stars are in binary pairs,” said lead author Stuart Ryder, an astronomer at the Australian Astronomical Observatory (AAO) in Sydney. This discrepancy between prediction and observation led astronomers to posit that Type IIb stripped-envelope supernovae may instead be a result of co-orbiting pairs of binary stars. ![]() “Also, the sheer number of stripped-envelope supernovas is greater than predicted.” “That was especially bizarre, because astronomers expected that they would be the most massive and the brightest progenitor stars,” said co-author Ori Fox, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, in a press release. However, this theory seems to be incomplete, as observers have not found enough progenitor stars to make it the only feasible scenario. Originally, astronomers believed that the progenitor stars to these supernovae lost their outer shells due to incredibly strong and fast stellar winds. ![]() And since then, astronomers have struggled to explain exactly how stripped-envelope supernovae actually lose their outer envelopes. In 1987, astronomer Alex Filippenko from the University of California, Berkeley, became the first person to identify this rare breed of supernovae. This unusual type of supernova occurs when the majority of a massive star’s hydrogen is stripped away prior to exploding. The supernova in question, SN 2001ig, is considered a Type IIb stripped-envelope supernova. Instead, it was most likely the instigator. Furthermore, according to the study, the supernova’s companion star was not just an innocent bystander to the explosion. The image of the companion star, which was seen in the fading afterglow of a supernova that exploded some 40 million light-years away in the galaxy NGC 7424, provides the most compelling evidence yet that some supernovae originate in double-star systems. According to a new study published March 28 in the Astrophysical Journal, astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope (HST) have taken the first-ever photograph of a surviving companion to a supernova. Though the Hubble Space Telescope celebrated its 28th year in space earlier this week, the orbiting observatory is apparently far from finished. ![]() InStock USD 1.00 1.00 science stars article ASY 47028 Hubble-captures-first-image-of-surviving-companion-to-a-supernova Hubble captures first image of surviving companion to a supernova Though the Hubble Space Telescope celebrated its 28th year in space earlier this week, the orbiting observatory is apparently far from finished. ![]()
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