VIDEO: NASA Captures Supernova birth – Newspaper Zócalo

BBC | MEXICO CITY At NASA astronomers can not hide his excitement. After two years studying every inch of the skies, they could see what was not seen before. The birth of a supernova

Supernovae occur when a star explodes, and with the help of space telescope Kepler, filmed with visible light when it happened.

in the video below you can see the bright flash of the shock wave, known as shock ruptura- that appears with the explosion.

“to see something that happens in a matter of minutes, as a clash of rupture, you have to have a camera monitoring the constantly sky,” said the professor of astrophysics at the university of Notre Dame Peter Garnavich, in a NASA statement.

“I do not know when a supernova will occur, and Kepler allowed us to witness from the beginning.”

Garnavich was who led the study that Thursday is published in the journal Nature.

the shock wave lasted less than an hour, so to “hunt” this time, the team had to analyze the light for more than two years every 30 minutes picked Kepler.

And the effort paid off.

red supergiants

in 2011, two massive stars, called red supergiant, exploded in the crosshairs of Kepler.

first, the KSN 2011a, is nearly 300 times the size of our sun and is at a distance of 700 million light years.

and second, KSN 2011d is about 500 times larger than our star and is located 1,200 million light years.

“to put these sizes in perspective, the Earth’s orbit around the sun would fit comfortably within these colossal stars “said Garnavich.

When a star of this size is aging and its energy is exhausted, gravity causes it to collapse.

While the two explosions released a similar energy, not could see a clash of break in the smaller star.

a mystery

Scientists believe this could be due to that it was surrounded by a gas hid when the shock wave reached breaking the surface of the star.

“This is the mystery of the results,” said Garnavich. “You look at two supernovas and see two different things, that is maximum diversity”..

The study of supernovae is important because all the heavy elements in the universe come from them

“By example, all silver, nickel and copper on Earth, even in our bodies comes from the explosion of dying stars, “said Steve Howell, another NASA scientist.

” life exists because supernovae, “he said.

the research team Studio Extragalactic Kepler is finishing desgranar data of the first mission of the telescope.

the Kepler now entered a second phase, with known as K2.

the team expects mission to hunt more events supernovas in distant galaxies even more.

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