![]() ![]() Two Unusual Eventsįollowing Dong’s discovery, Caltech graduate student Anna Ho (PhD ’20) suggested that this radio transient be compared with a different catalog of brief bright events in the X-ray spectrum. Yet, the gas shell itself, and the timescale on which it was cast off from the star, were unusual, so Dong suspected that there might be more to the story of this explosion. VT 1210+4956, the radio transient, occurred when the star finally exploded in a supernova and the material ejected from the explosion interacted with the gas shell. This gas shell had been cast off the star a few hundred years before the present day. This source is tied for the brightest radio transient ever associated with a supernova.ĭong determined that the bright radio energy was originally a star surrounded by a thick and dense shell of gas. “But in this case, an invading black hole or neutron star has prematurely triggered its companion star to explode.” This is the first time a merger-triggered supernova has ever been confirmed.ĭillon Dong, with a 40-meter radio dish at Caltech’s Owens Valley Radio Observatory in the background.Īs Dong sifted through the VLA’s massive dataset, he singled out an extremely luminous source of radio waves from the VLA survey called VT 1210+4956. “Massive stars usually explode as supernovae when they run out of nuclear fuel,” says Gregg Hallinan, professor of astronomy at Caltech. Now, led by Caltech graduate student Dillon Dong (MS ’18), a team of astronomers has established that the bright radio flare was caused by a black hole or neutron star crashing into its companion star in a never-before-seen process. In 2017, a particularly luminous and unusual source of radio waves was discovered in data taken by the Very Large Array (VLA) Sky Survey, a project that scans the night sky in radio wavelengths. The first observation of a brand-new kind of supernova had been predicted by theorists but never before confirmed. This will create the luminous transient radio source observed by the Very Large Array. After a few years, the supernova will crash through the bulk of the ejected spiral, which extends to about 10,000 times the size of the star. In this artist’s depiction, the jets are shown tunneling through the star, and will soon set off the supernova explosion. ![]() When it reached the star’s core, material from the core rapidly fell onto the stellar corpse and this led to the launching of a pair of jets at nearly the speed of light. ![]() Scientists say that the black hole or neutron star rammed into the massive star, and then, as it traveled inward over the course of centuries, ejected a spiral of material from the star’s atmosphere (pictured surrounding the star). The explosion was triggered after its dead-star companion (a black hole or neutron star) plunged into the star’s core. This illustration shows a massive star that is about to explode. ![]()
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