Space telescope Kepler recently unveiled groundbreaking data, specifically a supernova blast it captured after retiring when it ran out of fuel nine years later.
An Al Jazeera report said, data were recorded three years ago, in 2018, which is known that a billion years back, "a yellow supergiant," a star 100 times bigger than the Sun, collapsed onto itself, then bounced back, sending out a shockwave and debris, as it stretched in a cataclysmic blast.
According to Ph.D. student Patrick Armstrong, from the Australian National University, also the study's lead author, the light seen had actually "left that star a billion years back."
He added, scientists were fortunate Kepler was looking in that direction at that very moment. While stars live for billions of years, they usually die in a matter of weeks, with the exact blast and shockwave themselves physically noticeable just for a matter of days.
As mentioned, the groundbreaking data from Kepler comes three years following the space telescope was retired, as reported by NASA, when it ran out of fuel after nine years of operation.
The first mission of NASA to take an investigation of exoplanets in the galaxy, Kepler has left behind an unusual legacy, having identified thousands of exoplanets that orbit stars, many of which, found in arrangements that had not been conceived of in the past, which included planets orbiting around two stars. Kepler found planets as well that was possible to have water or were near the Earth's size.
ALSO READ: Kepler Space Telescope Reveals About 300 Million Habitable Planets Possibly Exist in the Milky Way
Star Exploding Every 100 Years
One of the co-authors of the study, Brad Tucker, also the supervisor of Armstrong at ANU, has been poring over what Kepler sent back since 2013.
He said a star is exploding every 100 years in an average galaxy, and this space telescope enabled "us to stack the deck" by observing tens of thousands of galaxies.
He added, he is confident that Kepler has much to offer, with new studies on supernovae based on this telescope's data possible to be published in the months ahead.
Kepler provides so much data, and it takes quite a lot of time to examine and analyze it in such an extraordinary way. And thus, he continued, he thinks they will be turning to the space telescope even in the future.
Unprecedented Data
The supernova is described to be "unprecedented," the first to provide a clear view of the shockwave's progression, traveling through a star at its life's end, starting with the explosion's earliest moments.
As part of the Kepler 2 survey, the space telescope was trained on a single patch of sky for around 80 days. Every half an hour, it took an image of what it saw.
On the contrary, a ground-based telescope would just have been able to conduct observations at night. According to a similar 8monet report, the difference between looking through Kepler and a ground-based telescope is between watching a movie and looking at a slideshow, explained Armstrong. He added, they were undeniably excited by the high quality of data they were observing.
The team of Armstrong used the data to test numerous models and studied the shock cooling light curve, which gauged the change in the amount of light released over time by the supernovae.
Related information about supernova captured by Kepler is shown on Karthik Rana's YouTube video below:
RELATED ARTICLE : The Discovery of Star "Cooking" Its Baby Planets Sheds Light on Finding Habitable Exoplanets in Space
Check out more news and information on Space on Science Times.
