NASA’s Hubble telescope captures an exploding star 70-million light-years from Earth- Technology News, Firstpost

FP TrendingOct 05, 2020 16:29:13 IST

NASA’s Hubble telescope has captured a supernova from a nearby galaxy as it shone brighter than other stars before fading out completely. Now astronomers have stitched together the consecutive photos taken over a year in a time-lapse sequence.

The supernova 2018gv was first detected in mid-January by amateur astronomer Koichi Itagaki, said NASA. A few weeks later, in February, Hubble began observing the supernova. The supernova is located in the spiral galaxy NGC 2525, which is 70 million light-years away from Earth.

The supernova was observed by Hubble astronomers to “precisely measure the expansion rate of the universe”. As supernovae can serve as accurate markers of measuring galaxy distances, these galactic blasts can give a “fundamental value needed for measuring the expansion of space”.

This means that by knowing the “actual brightness” of the supernova, astronomers are able to calculate the distances of their host galaxies. This in turn helps astronomers to measure the expansion rate of the universe.

It was in January, 2018 that the initial blast took place. This blast was not recorded by Hubble but it captured consecutive pictures of the 2018gv from 2018 to 2019 as the supernova became brighter than the brightest stars of the spiral galaxy to only lose its light and fade out ultimately. The report explained the particular case of supernova. The 2018gv had originated from a burned-out white dwarf that was part of a close binary system. “When the white dwarf reaches a critical mass, its core becomes hot enough to ignite nuclear fusion, turning it into a giant atomic bomb. This thermonuclear runaway process tears the dwarf apart. The opulence is short-lived as the fireball fades away,” read the report from the space agency.

Nobel laureate Adam Riess, who is associated with the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, said that no Earthly fireworks can compete with the supernova that was captured by the Hubble Space Telescope even as it faded. Riess is also the leader of the High-z Supernova Search Team and the Supernovae H0 for the Equation of State (SH0ES) Team to measure the universe’s expansion rate.

Watch the time-lapse video created from the several snapshots captured by Hubble here.