Thanks to its home in the Pinwheel galaxy, a favorite of amateur astronomers, researchers have monitored SN 2023ixf since shortly after it exploded.
In May, a star in the Pinwheel galaxy exploded in just the right place at nearly the right time for astronomers to unravel details of its death. It was the closest supernova to go off in the last five years.
Because researchers can’t predict when a star will die, they typically wouldn’t have lots of images of a supernova from shortly after it happened, says Edo Berger, an astronomer at Harvard University. But thanks to the supernova’s position in a nearby galaxy that’s popular with stargazers, scientists were able to use images from amateur astronomers to pin down when the star exploded to within just a few hours, says astronomer Daichi Hiramatsu, also at Harvard.
Stars like this one are the most common progenitors for explosions like SN 2023ixf, Kilpatrick says. And “in a lot of ways,” he notes, SN 2023ixf “is kind of a normal supernova.” To reconstruct these dramatic stellar death throes, the researchers scrutinized the light cast as SN 2023ixf exploded. As the star collapsed, it emitted a shock wave that set off a bright flash of light as the wave collided with material surrounding the star — including mass lost before the explosion. Using the explosion’s light to map out this material allowed the team to reconstruct SN 2023ixf’s mass loss rates leading up to the explosion.
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