Sentences with phrase «superluminous supernovae»

«There are also two other classes of extreme events — long duration gamma - ray bursts and superluminous supernovae — that frequently occur in dwarf galaxies, as well.

The Dark Energy Survey has discovered a number of superluminous supernovae and continues to see more distant cosmic explosions revealing how stars exploded during the strongest period of star formation.

Superluminous supernovae are 10 to 100 times brighter than a typical supernova resulting from the collapse of a massive star.

«The current idea is that a low - metal environment is important in creating superluminous supernovae, and that's why they tend to occur in low mass galaxies, but DES15E2mlf is in a relatively massive galaxy compared to the typical host galaxy for superluminous supernovae,» said Pan, a postdoctoral researcher at UC Santa Cruz and first author of the paper.

Previous observations of superluminous supernovae found they typically reside in low - mass or dwarf galaxies, which tend to be less enriched in metals than more massive galaxies.

«What we really want to know is the relative rate of superluminous supernovae to normal supernovae, but we can't yet make that comparison because normal supernovae are too faint to see at that distance.

These new discoveries belong to a special subclass of superluminous supernovae that have no hydrogen.

One of the newly discovered supernovae, named SNLS - 06D4eu, is the most distant and possibly the most luminous member of an emerging class of explosions called superluminous supernovae.

Such superluminous supernovae are rare, occurring perhaps once for every 10,000 normal supernovae.

Extremely bright exploding stars, called superluminous supernovae, and long gamma ray bursts also occur in this type of galaxy, he noted, and both are hypothesized to be associated with massive, highly magnetic and rapidly rotating neutron stars called magnetars.

«This should break all records for how long a superluminous supernova can be followed,» Raffaella Margutti, study co-author and an astronomer at Northwestern University, said in the statement.

SN 2017egm shares magnetar properties with other superluminous supernovas, but the researchers noted that the newly discovered supernova does have some differences.

This work marks the first time astronomers have identified a superluminous supernova that exploded in a large spiral galaxy, and in a metal - rich area.

«Superluminous supernovas were already the rock stars of the supernova world,» Matt Nicholl, lead author of the study and an astronomer at the Harvard - Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said in the statement.

«It could be created by a superluminous supernova or a long gamma ray burst, and then later on, as it evolves and its rotation slows down a bit, it produces these fast radio bursts as well as continuous radio emission powered by that spindown.

This is the first clear evidence for a metal - rich birthplace for a superluminous supernova.

These results show that the amount of metals has at most only a small effect on the properties of a superluminous supernova and the engine driving it.

Following the recent discovery of one of these «superluminous supernovas,» a team of astronomers led by Matt Nicholl from the Harvard - Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge, Mass., has uncovered vital clues about where some of these extraordinary objects come from.

The dwarf galaxies that usually host superluminous supernovas are known to have a low metal content, which was thought to be an essential ingredient for making these explosions.

While the brightness of SN 2017egm and the properties of the magnetar that powers it overlap with those of other superluminous supernovas, the amount of mass ejected by SN 2017egm may be lower than the average event.

And, according to Laura Spitler, namesake of the Spitler burst and a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, in Bonn, Germany, magnetars generally form from stellar explosions called Type - I superluminous supernovas.

Not exact matches

Thousands of supernovas have happened in the past decade, but only about 50 of them were «superluminous,» meaning they were 100 times brighter than usual supernovas.

In fact, SN 2017egm was not only superluminous, but superclose: At just 420 million light - years away, it was three times closer than any other observed supernova of its type.

A rare, superluminous kind of stellar explosion does not fit into the usual supernova categories