Here is an unbelievable video in which you can see The brilliant flash of an exploding star’s shockwave what astronomers call the “shock breakout” has been captured for the first time in the optical wavelength or visible light by NASA’s planet-hunter, the Kepler space telescope. It lasted only 20 minutes and took place 1.2 billion light years away, but NASA managed to catch it on camera.
An international science team analyzed light captured by Kepler every 30 minutes over a three-year period from 500 distant galaxies, searching some 50 trillion stars. They were hunting for signs of massive stellar death explosions known as supernovae. A supernova occurs at the end of a massive star’s life, as a colossal, catastrophic explosion erupts, causing the star to burn brighter than some galaxies for around two weeks before fading to black.
In 2011, two of these massive stars (KSN 2011a, KSN 2011d), called red super-giants, exploded while in Kepler’s view. While both explosions delivered a similar energetic punch, no shock breakout was seen in KSN 2011d, the smaller of the super-giants. Scientists think that this is likely due to the smaller star being surrounded by gas, perhaps enough to mask the shockwave when it reached the star’s surface.
“To put their size into perspective, Earth’s orbit about our sun would fit comfortably within these colossal stars,” Peter Garnavich, an astrophysics professor at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. The shock breakout catching the flash of energy is an investigative milestone for astronomers.
“In order to see something that happens on timescales of minutes, like a shock breakout, you want to have a camera continuously monitoring the sky. You don’t know when a supernova is going to go off, and Kepler’s vigilance allowed us to be a witness as the explosion began,” said Garnavich.