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Dang! Record-Breaking Supernova Manages to “X-ray” the ENTIRE Universe

Supernova

In 2018 while life largely went on for the Human race, little did many of us know that the Earth was being bathed, along with the rest of our Universe in the X-Rays blasted from the largest “Cow” class Supernova ever recorded. The explosion was automatically detected by an X-ray telescope known as the Spektrum-Roentgen-Gamma (SRG) telescope, which was monitoring the sky for any brightening or dimming event. This particular event called AT2018cow is now the prototype for a new variety of supernova not detectable just by its amazing bright light, but by its incredible X-Ray brightening. Recently another event AT2020mrf was detected without a light signature and ONLY by its X-Ray signature that bathed the cosmos in X-Rays.

The science behind what happened is pretty extreme, initially when AT2018cow was first seen it was believed to be merely an extremely bright, high-temperature event, one similar to a supernova, but with a few quirks to it. Namely, the event was ridiculously bright in the UV spectrum, a lot of iron was detected, and much, much brighter… like 10 times as bright, and that brightness extended across the whole signal electromagnetic spectrum from X-Ray all the way down to radio. The weirdest still: the supernova seemed to be surrounded by extremely dense matter with a blindingly fast shockwave blowing through it.

Scientists concluded that this wasn’t just a “Cow” style event. As the pieces started to line up it became clear to the researchers that they were looking at an entirely new type of phenomenon. According to BigThink, they discovered:

A Supernova X-Ray Blast That Lights Up the Galaxy

If there were a cocoon of gas surrounding a star that was reaching the end of its life, then:

  • an initial supernova would shock the surrounding cocoon
  • the material would heat to exceedingly high temperatures
  • the injected energy would cause a “breakout” event, creating the extreme brightness, the rapid increase in luminosity, and the ultra-fast shock wave
  • the remnant of the supernova, like a neutron star, would continue to inject energy for long periods of time after the initial explosion

This new class of objects are now known not exclusively as “Cow” class objects, but rather as FBOTs: Fast Blue Optical Transients.”

In the end, the new event AT2020mrf was about 20 times brighter than AT2018cow in the X-Ray spectrum with an intense but variable brightness that lit up the entire sky with X-Rays for less than a day… All of the subsequent observations confirmed it and AT2020mrf was recorded as the fifth observed FBOT. The anomaly soon became a candidate for observation by NASA’s Chandra X-ray telescope.

“Armed with the knowledge that they had discovered a potentially unique Fast Blue Optical Transient, a team of scientists led by first author Yuhan Yao of Caltech applied for, and received, observing time on NASA’s Chandra X-ray telescope to follow-up on this object.”

In the end the object shattered records of X-Ray observation. Almost a year after the initial blast the observatory saw 29 X-Ray photons from the object, an absurdly large amount considering the scope of the Universe. The X-Ray source was even more massive than expected. now 200 times as bright as AT2018cow!

But for now, there are still more questions than answers.

As Yao said according to BigThink:

“When I saw the Chandra data, I didn’t believe the analysis at first. I reran the analysis several times. This is the brightest Cow supernova seen to date in X-rays. […] In Cow-like events, we still don’t know why the central engine is so active, but it probably has something to do with the type of the progenitor star being different from normal explosions.”

What do you think?

Written by Staff Editor

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