You’re about to watch how a star dies

You have just seen an exploding star. When astronomers first reviewed the data behind these images in 2012, they thought it might be a computer error. Their doubts had to do with the unusualness of the recorded data: the information from NASA’s Kepler telescope shows the explosion of a star in just a fraction of the time that this type of process usually takes.

The explosion captured was 10 times faster than that of a common supernova.

“When I first saw the Kepler data, and realised how short this transient is, my jaw dropped.” says Brad Tucker, a researcher at the Australian National University.

A SHORT AND BRIGHT GOODBYE

When a star is about to go out, it is enveloped in a shell of gas and dust. But this star, located about 1.3 billion light-years away, exploded differently. Faster.

The event is known as FELT, short for Fast-Evolving Luminous Transient. Astronomers came across something they didn’t expect to be able to see.

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Why is this finding important? Because the way a star perishes tells astronomers how the matter that makes up our world is formed and distributed, and helps to understand how fast the Universe is expanding.

THE KEPLER EYE

This unusual observation was made possible by the precision of the Kepler space telescope, known for showing exoplanets or planets outside the solar system for the first time.

Jessi Dotson, a project scientist for Kepler, based at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, California, says this instrument has allowed them a new way of looking at the sky because «It was designed to do one thing really well, which was to find planets around other stars. In order to do that, it had to deliver high-precision, continuous data, which has been valuable for other areas of astronomy.»

Thus it was possible to detect such a short moment in time.

In order to analyze the data more precisely and reach this and other incredible conclusions, such as the discovery of other supernovae, astronomer Ed Shaya and his colleague Robert Olling of the University of Maryland had to devise special software. Thanks to their work, they and other scientists were able to not only track, but better understand how and why stellar explosions occur.

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After nine years in deep space, collecting data that revealed that our night sky was filled with billions of hidden planets – more planets even than stars – NASA decided to retire Kepler in October 2018 after running out of fuel for future scientific operations.

Kepler leaves a legacy of more than 2,600 discoveries of planets outside our solar system, many of which could be promising places for life.

In 2018 NASA launched the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) which is expected to provide a lot of valuable information about supernovae in the future.