Bottom left: This is a 1997 Hubble archival visible-light image of the region of the galaxy where the supernova exploded. The white circle marks a star that Hubble measured to have an absolute magnitude of -10.3. This corresponds to the brightness of 1 million suns (at the galaxy’s distance of 215 million light-years).
Bottom center: This is a near-infrared-light photo of the supernova explosion taken on November 11, 2005, with the Keck telescope, using adaptive optics. The blast is centered on the position of the progenitor.
Bottom right: This is a visible-light Hubble follow-up image taken on September 26, 2007. Note that a bright source near the site of the supernova can be seen in all three panels, but the progenitor star is gone. The Hubble pictures from both epochs were taken with the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2.
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has identified a star that was one million times brighter than the Sun before it exploded as a supernova in 2005. According to current theories of stellar evolution, the star should not have self-destructed so early in its life. “This might mean that we are fundamentally wrong about the evolution of massive stars and that theories need revising,” said Avishay Gal-Yam of the Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel.
The doomed star, which is estimated to have had about 100 times our Sun’s mass, was not mature enough, according to theory, to have evolved a massive iron core of nuclear fusion ash. This is the prerequisite for a core implosion that triggers a supernova blast.
The explosion, called supernova SN 2005gl, was seen in the barred-spiral galaxy NGC 266 October 5, 2005. Pre-explosion pictures from the Hubble archive, taken in 1997, reveal the progenitor as a luminous point source with an absolute visual magnitude of -10.3.
The progenitor was so bright that it probably belonged to a class of stars called Luminous Blue Variables (LBVs), “because no other type of star is as intrinsically brilliant,” said Gal-Yam. As an LBV-class star evolves it sheds much of its mass through a violent stellar wind. Only at that point does it develop a large iron core and ultimately explodes as a core-collapse supernova.
Extremely massive and luminous stars topping 100 solar masses, such as Eta Carinae in our own Milky Way Galaxy, are expected to lose their entire hydrogen envelopes prior to their ultimate explosions as supernovae. “These observations demonstrate that many details in the evolution and fate of LBVs remain a mystery,” said supernova expert Mario Livio of the Space Telescope Science Institute of Baltimore. “We should continue to keep an eye on Eta Carinae – it may surprise us yet again.”
“The progenitor identification shows that, in some cases, massive stars explode before losing most of their hydrogen envelope, suggesting that the evolution of the core and the evolution of the envelope are less coupled than previously thought,” said co-author Douglas Leonard from San Diego State University, California. This finding may require a revision of stellar evolution theory.”
One possibility is that the progenitor to SN 2005gl was really a pair of stars, a binary system that merged. This would have stoked nuclear reactions to brighten the star enormously, making it look more luminous and less evolved than it really is. “This also leaves open the question that there may be other mechanisms for triggering supernova explosions,” said Gal-Yam. “We may be missing something very basic in understanding how a super-luminous star goes through mass loss.”
Gal-Yam reports that the observation revealed that only a small part of the star’s mass was flung off in the explosion. Most of the material, says Gal-Yam, was drawn into the collapsing core that has probably become a black hole estimated to be at least 10 to 15 solar masses.
Gal-Yam and Leonard located the progenitor in archival images of NGC 266 taken in 1997. It was easily identifiable only because it is super luminous. Only Hubble could clearly resolve it at such a great distance.
The team then used the Keck telescope in Mauna Kea, Hawaii, to precisely locate the supernova on the outer arm of the galaxy. A follow-up observation with Hubble in 2007 showed that the super-luminous star was gone. To make sure the new observation was consistent with the 1997 archival image, the astronomers used the same Hubble camera used in 1997, the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2.
Finding archival images of stars before the stars exploded as supernovae isn’t an easy task. Several other supernova progenitor candidates have been reported prior to the Hubble observation. The only other absolutely indisputable progenitor, however, was the blue supergiant progenitor to SN 1987A. In the case of SN 1987A, it was thought that the progenitor star was once a red supergiant and at a later stage evolved back to blue supergiant status. This led to a major reworking of supernova theory. The progenitor star observed by Gal-Yam is too massive to have gone through such an oscillation to the red giant stage, so yet another new explanation is required, he said.
