It all started with South African amateur astronomer Berto Monard, who discovered a new bright object in the sky. This object – called SN 2022jli – is located in the spiral arm of a galaxy called NGC 157, located about 76 million light-years away.
The appearance of a bright object in the sky usually means it is a supernova, and astronomers quickly pointed their telescopes in its direction in an attempt to detect it. Supernovae are difficult to study because their behavior is impossible to predict and they evaporate quickly.
A supernova is a star that has reached the final stage of its development, the brightness of which instantly increases millions of times following the explosion. As a result of the explosion, an extremely dense object can be formed – a neutron star or a black hole – the amount of energy of which is comparable to the amount of energy emitted by the Sun during its entire life.
Irregularities in the behavior of SN 2022jli have been noted. It was bright at first and slowly faded before brightening again a month after its discovery. He then noticed strange ripples every 12 days or so for the next 200 days.
“In the data from SN 2022jli, we see a repeating sequence of brightness and dimming,” says Thomas Moore of the University of Belfast, whose research on the supernova was published last year in the Astrophysical Journal. “This is the first time that periodic oscillations repeated over several cycles have been detected in the light curve of a supernova.”
Both teams believe that another star, which somehow survived the supernova explosion, was to blame and allowed them to “see” the object.
The researchers hypothesize that a black hole or neutron star would steal hydrogen from its companion’s bulging atmosphere. It releases a lot of energy in the form of waves, the oscillations of which have been detected by scientists.
“The unprecedented properties of SN 2022jli suggest that whatever is happening in this system must be a rare phenomenon that can be explained by the rarity of a bound binary system surviving a supernova explosion,” the researchers write in their paper published in Nature.
Comment Read comments (1)
2024-01-13 14:39:00
astronomers-have-seen-the-birth-of-a-black-hole-for-the-first-time