Astronomers Sink Their Teeth Into Special Supernova

Calcium-rich supernovae, a unique type of exploding stars, produce up to half of the calcium in the Universe

5 August 2020

Astronomers using several telescopes at NOIRLab, including the Southern Astrophysical Research (SOAR) Telescope, have obtained critical data on a particular type of exploding star that produces copious amounts of calcium. The calcium produced in this unique type of supernova explosion is the same calcium found in our bones and teeth and these events account for up to half of the calcium found in the Universe.

Thanks to detailed observations using the SOAR Telescope, located on Cerro Pachón in Chile, and a host of telescopes around the world and in space [1], astronomers have been able to probe the inner workings of a special type of supernova explosion. These particular explosions, from compact stars that lose copious amounts of mass late in their lives, appear to create the element calcium in their last dying gasps — and it is dispersed by the explosion throughout galaxies like the Milky Way. SOAR is a facility of Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), a Program of NSF’s NOIRLab.

“Most massive stars create small amounts of calcium during their lifetimes, but events like SN 2019ehk appear to be responsible for producing vast quantities of calcium and in the process of exploding disperse it through interstellar space within galaxies. Ultimately this calcium makes its way into forming planetary systems,” according to Régis Cartier, an astronomer at NOIRLab and a member of the research team, “...and into our bodies in the case of our Earth!”

Raffaella Margutti, senior author of the study at Northwestern University, adds that prior to this event astronomers had only indirect information on these events, called calcium-rich supernovae. "With this direct evidence, we can now confidently rule out the production of calcium-rich supernovae by the vast majority of massive stars," said Margutti. 

“By observing what this star did in its final month before it reached its critical, tumultuous end, we peered into a place previously unexplored, opening new avenues of study,” said Wynn Jacobson-Galan, of Northwestern University, who led the study. The results are published in the 5 August issue of The Astrophysical Journal, which included contributions from a huge collaboration of nearly 70 co-authors from over 15 countries.

The SOAR data were critical to the result. In particular, the infrared spectrum acquired with SOAR, only the second ever obtained of a calcium-rich supernova, opened a new window on the kind of elements expelled by the supernova — elements such as helium, carbon, magnesium and calcium, all of which have a clear spectral fingerprint at infrared wavelengths. Understanding how much and what kind of elements are expelled by a supernova provides critical clues to the nature of the explosion — what kind of star exploded and how it exploded. It also provides insights into how calcium-rich supernovae produce so much calcium. While that interesting question remains an open issue, the SOAR observations represent some of the first steps toward an answer. 

“Because these events are so rare, and difficult to detect because they are faint, we don’t have a lot of data on which to base our theories about what happens as these stars expel material in their death throes,” said Cartier.

The explosive event occurred in the relatively nearby galaxy known as Messier 100 which is a popular target for amateur astronomers and is readily visible through small telescopes. In fact, it was amateur astronomer Joel Shepherd who first spotted the light from the exploding star while stargazing in Seattle on 28 April 2019, and soon thereafter it was designated SN 2019ehk. Messier 100 is a beautiful spiral galaxy similar to our Milky Way and is located some 55 million light-years away towards the constellation of Coma Berenices (Berenice’s Hair) in the northern sky near the constellation of Ursa Major (The Great Bear) which contains the Big Dipper.

According to Jacobson-Galan, once the discovery was announced telescopes around the world and in space were pointed at the exploding star. 

Augmenting optical and infrared observations like those by SOAR, X-ray observations revealed a flood of high-energy X-rays from SN 2019ehk — the first time they were observed in a calcium-rich supernova. According to the researchers, nobody had ever thought to look at this type of explosion in X-ray light so soon after it occurred.

The combination of observations by SOAR and other telescopes led to the team’s conclusion that this calcium-rich supernova was a compact star that expelled an outer layer of gas as it expired. When it exploded its expelled material collided with surrounding material in its outer shell and the extremely hot temperatures produced X-rays and powered the chemical reactions that make calcium.

The SOAR Telescope’s role in studying this event reflects its evolution toward preparations for the massive Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), which will be carried out at the nearby Vera C. Rubin Observatory, also sited on Cerro Pachón. As SOAR Director Jay Elias explained, “The SOAR Telescope is a flexible platform, designed to be able to respond quickly to unexpected astronomical events like this one. In recent years, SOAR has observed many such transient events discovered by large-area surveys in order to probe the nature of those events. We are continually working to increase the telescope's efficiency and agility as we prepare for the start of LSST.”

"This type of science, which is critically time-dependent, is an important aspect of where astronomy is heading,” said Edward Ajhar of the US National Science Foundation. “Future facilities such as the Rubin Observatory will discover thousands of transient events like this and will keep astronomers busy making many new discoveries.”

Notes

[1] Post-explosion observations and spectra for this result were also collected by several facilities at NOIRLab observatories including the Bok 2.3-meter Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory and Las Cumbres Observatory telescopes at CTIO, as well as at the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, the Swope 1-meter telescope at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile, the PlaneWave CDK-700 0.7-meter telescope at Thacher Observatory in California, Las Cumbres Observatory telescopes in South Africa (Sutherland), Australia (Siding Spring, Faulkes Telescope South) and the US (McDonald and Faulkes Telescope North), the ATLAS twin 0.5-meter telescope system in Hawai‘i, the Konkoly Observatory in Hungary, the ESO New Technology Telescope, the MMT Observatory, and the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array in New Mexico. Pre-explosion data from the Hubble Space Telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory were also used.

More information

This research was presented in a paper to appear in the 5 August issue of The Astrophysical Journal. 

The team is composed of  Wynn V. Jacobson-Galán (Northwestern University and University of California, Santa Cruz), Raffaella Margutti (Northwestern University), Charles D. Kilpatrick (University of California, Santa Cruz), Daichi Hiramatsu (University of California, Santa Barbara and Las Cumbres Observatory), Hagai Perets (Technion - Israel Institute of Technology), David Khatami (University of California, Berkeley), Ryan J. Foley (University of California, Santa Cruz), John Raymond (Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian), Sung-Chul Yoon (Seoul National University), Alexey Bobrick (Lund University), Yossef Zenati (Technion - Israel Institute of Technology), Lluís Galbany (Universidad de Granada), Jennifer Andrews (Steward Observatory), Peter J. Brown (Texas A&M University), Régis Cartier (Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory/NOIRLab), Deanne L. Coppejans (Northwestern University), Georgios Dimitriadis (University of California, Santa Cruz), Matthew Dobson (Queen’s University Belfast), Aprajita Hajela (Northwestern University), D. Andrew Howell (University of California, Santa Barbara and Las Cumbres Observatory), Hanindyo Kuncarayakti (University of Turku), Danny Milisavljevic (Purdue University), Mohammed Rahman (The Thacher School), César Rojas-Bravo (University of California, Santa Cruz), David J. Sand (Steward Observatory), Joel Shepherd (Seattle Astronomical Society), Stephen J. Smartt (Queen’s University Belfast), Holland Stacey (The Thacher School), Michael Stroh (Northwestern University), Jonathan J. Swift (The Thacher School), Giacomo Terreran (Northwestern University), Jozsef Vinko (CSFK Konkoly Observatory, University of Szeged, and ELTE Eötvös Loránd University), Xiaofeng Wang (Tsinghua University and Beijing Planetarium), Joseph P. Anderson (European Southern Observatory), Edward A. Baron (University of Oklahoma), Edo Berger (Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian), Peter K. Blanchard (Northwestern University), Jamison Burke (University of California, Santa Barbara and Las Cumbres Observatory), David A. Coulter (University of California, Santa Cruz), Lindsay DeMarchi (Northwestern University), James M. DerKacy (University of Oklahoma), Christoffer Fremling (California Institute of Technology), Sebastian Gomez (Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian), Mariusz Gromadzki (University of Warsaw), Griffin Hosseinzadeh (Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian), Daniel Kasen (University of California, Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory), Levente Kriskovics (CSFK Konkoly Observatory and ELTE Eötvös Loránd University), Curtis McCully (University of California, Santa Barbara and Las Cumbres Observatory), Tomás E. Müller-Bravo (University of Southampton), Matt Nicholl (University of Birmingham and University of Edinburgh), András Ordasi (CSFK Konkoly Observatory), Craig Pellegrino (University of California, Santa Barbara and Las Cumbres Observatory), Anthony L. Piro (The Observatories of the Carnegie Institution for Science), András Pál (CSFK Konkoly Observatory, ELTE Eötvös Loránd University), Juanjuan Ren (National Astronomical Observatory of China), Armin Rest (Space Telescope Science Institute and The Johns Hopkins University), R. Michael Rich (University of California at Los Angeles), Hanna Sai (Tsinghua University), Krisztián Sárneczky (CSFK Konkoly Observatory), Ken J. Shen (University of California, Berkeley), Philip Short (University of Edinburgh), Matthew Siebert (University of California, Santa Cruz), Candice Stauffer (Northwestern University), Róbert Szakáts (CSFK Konkoly Observatory), Xinhan Zhang (Tsinghua University), Jujia Zhang (Yunnan Astronomical Observatory of China), and Kaicheng Zhang (Tsinghua University).

NSF’s NOIRLab (National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory), the US center for ground-based optical-infrared astronomy, operates the international Gemini Observatory (a facility of NSF, NRC–Canada, ANID–Chile, MCTIC–Brazil, MINCyT–Argentina, and KASI–Republic of Korea), Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO), Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), the Community Science and Data Center (CSDC), and Vera C. Rubin Observatory (in cooperation with DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory). It is managed by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) under a cooperative agreement with NSF and is headquartered in Tucson, Arizona. The astronomical community is honored to have the opportunity to conduct astronomical research on Iolkam Du’ag (Kitt Peak) in Arizona, on Maunakea in Hawaiʻi, and on Cerro Tololo and Cerro Pachón in Chile. We recognize and acknowledge the very significant cultural role and reverence that these sites have to the Tohono O'odham Nation, to the Native Hawaiian community, and to the local communities in Chile, respectively.

The Southern Astrophysical Research (SOAR) Telescope, is a joint project of the Ministério da Ciência, Tecnologia e Inovações do Brasil (MCTIC/LNA), NSF’s NOIRLab, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), and Michigan State University (MSU).

The Las Cumbres Observatory global telescope network is a non-profit science institute with the mission of advancing science and education has five telescopes between 0.4 and 1.0 meters deployed at CTIO.

The Bok 2.3-meter Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory is operated by Steward Observatory at the University of Arizona. 

Contacts

Wynn Jacobson-Galan
Northwestern University
Cell: +1 310-966-7779
Email: wynnjacobson-galan2024@u.northwestern.edu

Raffaella Margutti
Northwestern University
Cell: +1 857-919-6209
Email: raffaella.margutti@northwestern.edu

Régis Cartier
Astronomer at CTIO/NSF’s NOIRLab
Cell: +56 982 873 645
Email: rcartier@ctio.noao.edu

Peter Michaud
NewsTeam Manager
NSF’s NOIRLab, Gemini Observatory, Hilo HI
Cell: +1 808-936-6643
Email: pmichaud@gemini.edu

Amanda Kocz
Press and Internal Communications Officer
NSF’s NOIRLab
Cell: +1 520 318 8591
Email: akocz@aura-astronomy.org