Skip to main content

Hubble had a ringside seat to observe a star going supernova

When they run out of fuel and come to the end of their lives, stars can die in a most dramatic fashion: Exploding in an epic supernova that throws out dust and gas at tremendous speeds. Astronomers often see the remnants of such supernovas, but recently the Hubble Space Telescope observed something much rarer when it captured a star in the process of going supernova.

Supernova SN 2020fqv is located in the two interacting Butterfly Galaxies, 60 million light-years away from Earth. It was first spotted in April 2020 by the Zwicky Transient Facility at the Palomar Observatory when the star was in the earliest stages of a supernova, and Hubble scientists quickly decided to turn their attention to it as well.

Astronomers recently witnessed supernova SN 2020fqv explode inside the interacting Butterfly galaxies.
Astronomers recently witnessed supernova SN 2020fqv explode inside the interacting Butterfly galaxies, located about 60 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo. Researchers quickly trained NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope on the aftermath. AUTHOR: NASA, ESA, Ryan Foley (UC Santa Cruz) IMAGE PROCESSING: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)

“We used to talk about supernova work like we were crime scene investigators, where we would show up after the fact and try to figure out what happened to that star,” explained team leader Ryan Foley of the University of California, Santa Cruz, in a statement. “This is a different situation, because we really know what’s going on and we actually see the death in real time.”

Hubble was able to catch a glimpse of the material around the star, called circumstellar material, just a few hours after the supernova had occurred. This is an incredibly rare opportunity to study what happened to the star in its final days, as this material is only visible to telescopes for a very short time.

Along with data from NASA’s exoplanet-hunting Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which was also observing the region, scientists were able to build up a picture of what happened to the star in its final years before exploding.

“Now we have this whole story about what’s happening to the star in the years before it died, through the time of death, and then the aftermath of that,” said Foley. “This is really the most detailed view of stars like this in their last moments and how they explode.”

Understanding this particular star could help us understand other stars which may be on the verge of going supernova, like our neighboring star Betelgeuse which some people thought could be about to go supernova in 2019 (though in that case, the star’s odd behavior turned out to be due to a cloud of dust rather than an imminent explosion).

“This could be a warning system,” said Foley. “So if you see a star start to shake around a bit, start acting up, then maybe we should pay more attention and really try to understand what’s going on there before it explodes. As we find more and more of these supernovas with this sort of excellent data set, we’ll be able to understand better what’s happening in the last few years of a star’s life.”

Editors' Recommendations

Georgina Torbet
Georgina is the Digital Trends space writer, covering human space exploration, planetary science, and cosmology. She…
Hubble image shows a lonely star glowing over an irregular background galaxy
The bright star BD+17 2217. Arp 263 – also known as NGC 3239 in the foreground and irregular galaxy Arp 263 in the background.

This week's image from the Hubble Space Telescope is notable for the way it was composed as much as for the object it shows. Composed of two different exposures which have been merged, it shows the star BD+17 2217 shining over the background irregular galaxy Arp 263.

Irregular galaxies are those with irregular structures, unlike elliptical galaxies or spiral galaxies such as our Milky Way. Arp 263 is patchy and cloudy, with some areas glowing brightly due to star formation while other areas appear practically bare. Such galaxies are typically formed due to interactions with other galaxies, which can occur when a massive galaxy passes by and pulls the original galaxy out of shape. In the case of Arp 263, it is thought that it developed its irregular shape when two galaxies merged.

Read more
Hubble observes a cluster of boulders around impacted asteroid Dimorphos
A NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image of the asteroid Dimorphos taken on 19 December 2022.

Last year, NASA deliberately crashed a spacecraft into an asteroid, in a first-of-its-kind test of planetary defense. At the time, telescopes around the world including the Hubble Space Telescope observed the impact between the DART spacecraft and the Dimorphos asteroid, capturing footage of the plumes of dust thrown up. Now, Hubble has observed Dimorphos once again and seen that a number of boulders have been ejected from the asteroid.

The Hubble image shown below was taken on 19 December 2022, around four months after the impact, and shows the bright streak of the asteroid across the sky, surrounded by small boulders which were knocked loose during the impact. This view was only possible after several months as the impact initially sent up large amounts of dust which made it difficult to see the asteroid in detail.

Read more
One galaxy, two views: see a comparison of images from Hubble and Webb
The peculiar galaxy NGC 3256 takes centre stage in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. This distorted galaxy is the wreckage of a head-on collision between two spiral galaxies which likely occurred 500 million years ago, and it is studded with clumps of young stars which were formed as gas and dust from the two galaxies collided.

It might not seem obvious why astronomers need multiple different powerful space telescopes. Surely a more powerful telescope is better than a less powerful one? So why are there multiple different telescopes in orbit, either around Earth or around the sun?

The answer is to do with two main factors. One is the telescope's field of view, meaning how much of the sky it looks at. Some telescopes are useful for looking at large areas of the sky in less detail, working as survey telescopes to identify objects for further research or to look at the universe on a large scale -- like the recently launched Euclid mission. While others, like the Hubble Space Telescope, look at small areas of the sky in great detail, which is useful for studying particular objects.

Read more