Supernovae are among the most powerful explosions in the Universe. These explosion are in fact so powerful that for several centuries their blasts travel through space with thousands of km/s. Astronomers from Utrecht University, operating like cosmic crime scene investigators, have now been able to unveil the make up of one of those cosmic bombs, an object that goes by the name of 0519-690, which is located at a mere 150,000 light years from us. Like their CSI counterparts, they used X-rays, but in this case the explosion itself is the source of X-rays, which were recorded by ESA’s XMM-Newton telescope and NASA’s Chandra telescope.
The X-rays reveal that the blast was caused by the explosion from an extremely compact star, a so-called white dwarf. Such a star is as massive as the sun, but as small as the Earth. The explosion itself is akin to the most powerful human made bombs, hydrogen bombs. Such bombs are powered by nuclear fusion, the melting together of small atoms into larger ones. In this supernova carbon and oxygen from the white dwarf was fused mostly into iron, but also silicon and oxygen. In fact, most of the iron in our blood originates from these types of supernovae.
By using one of the instruments on board ESA’s XMM-Newton satellite, Daria Kosenko and her collaborators were able to obtain accurate “finger prints” of the debris of the explosion, using a technique called X-ray spectroscopy. In combination with NASA’s Chandra satellite they were able to reconstruct the structure of the bomb and to measure the current velocity of the blast wave. This informed them also how long ago the explosion occurred: some 450 year ago (that is without correcting for the 150,000 years that it took the light to travel to Earth).
“Our team has now investigated many of these remnants of supernovae, but none them showed the details of the explosion as clearly as this one”, explained Daria Kosenko. For astronomers, the detailed structures of the objects are important for understanding the origin of these supernovae, which, due to their extreme brightness, play an important role in measuring the evolution of the Universe. But, as co-author Eveline Helder explains, “Apart from their cosmic significance it is also very appealing to observe all these elements that surround us in our daily lives. We see for example the oxygen that we breathe, the silicon that is in the sand of our beaches, and the iron in our blood, all nicely lined up in the debris of an explosion that made all these elements. Explosions like the one we investigated are our cosmic origins.”
The results will be published by the European journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. A preprint can be found on Arxiv.org.
Image: An X-ray image of SNR 0519-690 taken by the Chandra telescope in three different energy bands corresponding to oxygen (red), iron (green) and silicon/sulphur (blue). Right: Finger-printing a supernova explosion: a high spectral resolution X-ray spectrum of 0519-690, obtained with the European XMM-Newton satellite using its RGS spectrometer.
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