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when NASA’s Kepler Telescope Looking at the space, it is also looking back.
Locked in the heliocentric orbit, Kepler will gradually track the earth, allowing the telescope to obtain a unique view of the universe.
This is how we know that 1 billion years ago, a yellow supergiant star, a star 100 times larger than the sun, collapsed on itself and bounced back, sending out shock waves and debris when it expanded in a catastrophic explosion.
Patrick Armstrong, a PhD student at the Australian National University and the lead author of a study published this month in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, told Al Jazeera: “The light we saw actually left 1 billion years ago. That star.”.
He added that the scientists were lucky when Kepler was looking in that direction. Although stars can live for billions of years, they usually die within a few weeks, while the actual explosions and shock waves themselves are only visible within a few days.
Kepler’s breakthrough data was released three years later The telescope was retired in 2018 When it ran out of fuel after nine years of operation.
As NASA’s first mission to investigate the exoplanets in our galaxy, Kepler left an extraordinary legacy, identifying thousands of exoplanets orbiting stars, many of which existed never before. The envisioned arrangement includes planets orbiting two stars. Kepler also discovered planets that may have water or are close to the size of Earth.
Precision metering
However, if Kepler has a superpower, it is that it can measure the brightness of a star to a fraction of a hundredth-it is equipped with a sophisticated photometer that enables it to track the glare caused by the passing of the star. The tiny dimming of a planet in front of it.
Allowing it to stare at a single space fragment for a long time provides a happy reward for unlocking a large number of other cosmic treasures-including historically difficult to track supernova and other phenomena, which will quickly enter and exit the field of vision.
Brad Tucker, one of the co-authors of the study and an advisor to Armstrong at the Australian National University, has been studying the information Kepler has sent back since 2013.
“In ordinary galaxies, one star explodes approximately every 100 years, and Kepler enables us to monitor tens of thousands of galaxies, allowing us to stack decks,” Tucker said, adding that he believes This telescope can still provide a lot of things. New research on supernovae based on Kepler data may be published in the next few months.
“Kepler has provided us with so much data, and in such a unique way, it takes a long time to carefully study, analyze and research. Therefore, I think even in the future, we will turn to Kepler.”
Kepler also discovered planets that may have water or are close to the size of Earth [NASA Handout via Reuters]The supernova data is unprecedented, and for the first time clearly shows the progress of the shock wave passing through the star at the end of the star’s life—from the earliest moment of the explosion.
As part of the Kepler-2 survey, the telescope trained on a piece of sky for approximately 80 days. Every 30 minutes, it will take a picture of what it sees. In contrast, ground-based telescopes can only observe at night.
Armstrong explained: “The difference between observation through ground-based telescopes and Kepler telescopes is the difference between watching slides and watching movies, so we are very excited about the high-quality data we see.”
Armstrong and his team used this data to test multiple models and examined the “impact cooling light curve,” which measures the amount of light emitted by a supernova over time.
Now, the name of the supernova SN2017jgh is expected to help scientists better understand how stars survive and die.
“We usually have to wait a few days or even weeks before we can capture the supernova-those first moments are still rarely seen,” Tucker said. “Now we know which model to use, so we can improve our use of all other supernova observations, and we must also understand other stars.”
Astronomers from @scienceANU Led an international. A group of researchers made the first observation of the light emitted by a supernova explosion! 💥https://t.co/GLxBmRK2xW#SpaceAustralia @ANUmedia @btucker22
📸 NASA pic.twitter.com/U4JHVTJ7dQ
-SpaceAustralia.com (@SpaceAusDotCom) August 12, 2021
Answer big questions
Studying supernovae can reveal many details about a star, including its size and composition. The explosion itself will produce a primordial soup of protons and neutrons, which will eventually lead to the birth of new planets and stars.
However, researchers are also interested in supernovae because studying them helps answer some major questions about the universe.
Armstrong explained that analyzing the light of specific types of supernovae allows researchers to determine the speed at which the universe is expanding and accelerating. “All of this has to do with our understanding of where the universe comes from, what it is made of, and things like that,” he said.
Now, researchers are looking forward to data from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which was launched in 2018 and completed its main mission in 2020, before beginning the extended mission phase.
Although Kepler’s mission is primarily a statistical mission-to find out whether Earth-sized exoplanets are common-TESS aims to identify specific exoplanet systems that should be examined further.
Tucker explained that TESS just sees more volume, and by providing more observations than Kepler, TESS will feel like it has changed from a 1080p display to a 4k display. Researchers say such tools make astronomy an exciting time.
“We are starting to really look at the universe in a way we have never seen before,” Tucker said. “We think the universe is a somewhat static place. There are many things that will not change, or will only last for billions of years, but the more we see, the more we realize how dynamic and evolving our universe is.”
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