Astronomers have discovered the remains of nearly two dozen exploding stars in the Milky Way thanks to detailed radio observations that could reveal many more such events in the Galaxy. A star in the Milky Way is expected to explode as a supernova at least once every 100 years. These violent explosions the dramatic final bouts of massive stars as they exhaust their fuel can eject huge clouds of dust and gas to locations many light-years away from the star.
Such ‘supernova remnants’ can persist for thousands of years before dissipating. Studying these remnants can reveal useful information about the Galaxy, as they often contain heavy elements that give rise to other stars, planets, and even life itself.
Hundreds of such remnants have been found throughout the Milky Way, but astronomers believe they have observed only about a fifth of the total. Most are found by detecting radio emissions from the remains as they expand and reveal their otherwise invisible shapes, but many are too faint to be detected. There’s the problem of the missing supernova remnant.
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But on January 16, a project led by Ball revealed a new way to track down supernova remnants. It combined the observational power of the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder (ASKAP), a 36-antenna radio telescope in Western Australia, with the Parkes Observatory, a single antenna in New South Wales, Australia, to detect previously unseen supernova remnants in Australia. a piece of the night sky.
Roland Kothes, a radio astronomer at the National Research Council of Canada based in Penticton and Ball’s supervisor says “We discovered 21 new candidates, image was the first test we did, and it worked amazingly well”.
The image the team released shows about five of the 21 newly discovered supernova remnants, including a figure-of-eight that is faintly visible in the upper left. The image was taken along one of the Milky Way’s spiral arms, the Norma Arm, near the dense galactic center, where dust and gas heavily obscure visible light.
Finding new remnants can tell us more about “the kinds of stars that explode as supernovae,” says Carlos Badenes, an astronomer at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania who studies supernova remnants. “It’s really fantastic that these guys are doing this.
Last year, ASKAP launched a five-year survey of the entire sky of the Southern Hemisphere, which makes up half of the visible Galaxy. This should reveal many more supernova remnants. “We’re detecting sources that previous telescopes couldn’t detect because they didn’t have the resolution or sensitivity,” says Ball. “We hope it will reveal a large population.”
Reference : https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00110-4
