Hubble investigates whether a star has “pretended” his own death

The Hubble has given us a new image. It is an image with history behind, even if it is not a story that can be appreciated at first glance. A story of false appearances.

Image of the week. The last “week of the week”Of Hubble Space Telescope shows the UGC 5460 galaxya galaxy in which a few years ago we detected what we believed were two supernovae. However, one of the outbreak could have been the result of a very different phenomenon: a blue luminous variable.

SN 2011ht and SN 2015as. A few years ago, the UGC 5460 galaxy He witnessed two great events to those that astronomers called SN 2011ht and SN 2015as. Their names refer to the fact that they were classified as Supernovas (SN) and the year in which they were discovered (2011 and 2015)

SN 2015as was listed as a Core collapse supernovaa type II supernova that occurs when the nucleus of a massive star (stars more massive than our sun) is left without “fuel” for fusion. This means that the nucleus ends up implicating because of its own severity, after which there is a kind of rebound effect.

The result: a “cataclysmic explosion”, as explained by Hubble. That is what happened with SN 2015as And it could also be what happened with SN 2011ht. But astronomers have another open hypothesis to explain this last outbreak.

Appearances can fool. A hypothesis with its own name: blue luminous variable (LBV), a “impostor” star capable of making astronomers fall into the mistake of confusing it with a supernova. The blue luminous variables are stars that occasionally generate eruptions of such magnitude that can be confused with supernovae.

However, these outbreaks do not occur at the end of the life of these stars. Rather they seem to represent points and apart in the life of This type of stars. LBVs are huge and unstable stars. They are also relatively Uncomowhich implies that what we know about them is not much.

While we know that the eruptions of the LBV do not represent the final explosion in the life of these star objects, astronomers They believe that they are an indication that the star is in the last stages of her life. A kind of final track, more than a lethal collapse.

Observing UGC 5460 to search for clues. That is why SN 2011ht is a unique opportunity for the instruments of the veteran Hubble to direction their attention to UGC 5460. The image, in which four wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum are combined will allow astronomers to learn more details about supernovae such as SN 2015as and, perhaps, help us solve the unknown about the nature of the outbreak observed four years before. And we may be able to unmask (for now alleged) “impostor.”

In Xataka | NASA is developing a Hubble super telescope capable of observing exoplanets. And only two rockets can launch it

Image | Este/Hubble & Nasa, W. Jacobson-Galán, A. Filippenko, J. Mauerhan