For the first time observing a giant star 'falling to death' in real time

Astronomers have observed this "dead end" period when a massive star explodes, ending its existence.

According to CNN, ground-based telescopes have helped scientists observe this event in real time for the first time. The event involved a red 'supergiant' star. Although these are not the brightest or most massive stars, they are the most massive stars.

Illustration of a red supergiant star spewing gas in its last year of existence.

The aforementioned star, located in the galaxy NGC 5731, about 120 million light-years from Earth, was 10 times the mass of the Sun before it exploded.

Before dying out, some stars undergo violent eruptions or release bright layers of hot gas. Previously, when astronomers had not witnessed this event, they assumed that red supergiant stars were relatively quiet before exploding into meteors or breaking up into a dense neutron star.

However, when the scientists observed, they saw the star violently self-destruct and turn into a meteor. The death of a star is a process of rapid fragmentation and violent explosion after it burns with hydrogen, helium and other elements in the core.

All that's left is the star's iron, but iron doesn't flow easily so the star will run out of energy. When that happens, the iron will explode and create a meteor.

The detailed study of these findings was published January 6 in the Astrophysical Journal.

"This is groundbreaking in our understanding of how massive stars behave just before they happen," said Wynn Jacobson-Galán, a research fellow at the National Science Foundation at the University of California at Berkeley. died. This is the first time that protostar activity has been directly observed in a red supergiant star that has never been observed before in an ordinary Type II meteor. For the first time, we saw a red supergiant explode.

Astronomers were first informed of the star's unusual activity 130 days before it became a meteor. The bright radiation was detected in the summer of 2020 using the Pan-STARRS telescope of the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Hawaii.

Then, in the fall of that year, the researchers witnessed a meteor in the same spot.

They observed it with the WM Keck Observatory's Low-Resolution Imaging Spectrometer in Maunakea, Hawaii. They named it meteor 2020tlf. Their observations showed that there was matter around the star when it exploded. This is a bright gas that spontaneously rises violently within the star during the summer.

Senior study author Raffaella Margutti, Associate professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Berkeley, said in a statement: 'It's like watching a ticking time bomb. We have only now confirmed such intense activity in a dying red supergiant star."

Some of these massive stars may undergo internal changes, causing a turbulent release of gas before they die.