Scientists at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Colaba, in partnership with in an international team of astronomers, have found a new class of supernovae.
In a discovery of stellar proportions, scientists at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) in Colaba, in partnership with in an international team of astronomers, have found a new class of supernovae. The find uncovers a new means to detect these rare phenomena.
When a massive star blows up in a very short span, it is called a supernova. Being rare, such events occur once every 50 years in a galaxy the size of the Milky Way, and discovering them requires extensive monitoring of many galaxies.
What makes this discovery special is that of the two kinds of supernovae — one which have a plasma outflow of speeds much less than that of light (called non-relativistic speeds), and those which blow up at relativistic speeds — the latter explosions have always been preceded by a gamma-ray burst. Hence, astronomers were looking for them only through gamma-ray detectors.
Called SN 2009bb, this was the first supernova to be detected exclusively through its radio emission, and did not have the gamma-ray precursor, said Alak K Ray, professor at TIFR’s department of astronomy and astrophysics, who was part of the research team.
Found in the spiral galaxy NGC 3278 with optical and radio telescopes, the supernova was discovered in March 2009. The findings have now been published in the respected science journal Nature, and in Astrophysical Journal Letters.
“It’s a very interesting paper and paves way for new techniques for discovering this new class of supernovae,” said professor Govind Swarup, former director of TIFR’s National Centre for Radio Astrophysics.
“Discovery of this unusual supernova indicates that future searches for relativistic supernovae should be based on radio and optical outbursts, and not just gamma-rays. Such rare and exceptional phenomena show new directions of investigation and can change our understanding of the underlying processes,” said Ray. The findings have been co-authored by Ray, TIFR’s Sayan Chakraborti (PhD student), Poonam Chandra (former TIFR student), Alicia Soderberg (assistant professor at Harvard University) and Emily Levesque (student at University of Hawaii).
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