This study has the potential to help us better understand how and when supernovae can occur throughout the universe.
But how important is it to discover supernovae before they actually happen?
“In my view, it’s important in two ways,” said Daiichi Tsuna, an astrophysicist at the University of Tokyo’s Early Universe Research Center and lead author of the study. First, while we know that SNe are explosions that signal the death of massive stars, what happens Near the end of its life is still a mystery.Our paper claims that we can investigate in depth this precursor through future observations, which can help deepen our understanding of stellar evolution and refine current theory.Second, finding SN precursors will allow for very early warning of SN in the future. It will help extend the time frame available for coordinating multi-messenger observations (light, neutrinos, and gravitational waves).”
The researchers used the open source code CHIPS (The Complete History of Interaction Supported Supernovae) to create a theoretical model of such a discharge from a mass explosion of a red giant star.
This is intriguing because the star Betelguese, observed in 2019 to be dim in brightness, sparking discussions about the possibility of a supernova, is also a red giant star.
As it turns out, Betelguese is nearing the end of its life, but a 2021 study said it’s not set to explode for another 100,000 years. But what implications could this search for Betelguese have?
Tsuna explains, “Betelgeuse is a super red giant, which is exactly the type of star we studied in this paper. Thus, if Betelgeuse erupts very close, it may display this type of precursor emission just before the SN. Since Betelgeuse is so close to us, it might Neutrino detectors find emitted neutrinos as early as days before SN.”
The results of the study indicate that the volcanic light curves are fueled by a brief pulse of shock waves lasting only a few days, followed by a much longer cooling discharge lasting hundreds of days.
For low-energy eruptions, this period is followed by a dark peak period, fueled by the so-called bound envelope, and receding.
The study concludes by saying that such mass explosions “could serve as an early warning of a near future of SN, which will be important for multi-message studies of SNe collapse”.
“One thing I would like to emphasize is that we have a bright future for discovering these types of rather bleak precursors,” Tsuna said. “For example, in a few years’ time, the Rubin Observatory will conduct large-scale field survey observations with a sensitivity much deeper than current surveys. sensitive enough to detect these types of emissions.”
Source: Science Alert