SN 2008D is a

supernova A supernova is a powerful and luminous explosion of a star. It has the plural form supernovae or supernovas, and is abbreviated SN or SNe. This transient astronomical event occurs during the last evolutionary stages of a massive star or when ...

detected with

NASA The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil space program, aeronautics research, and space research. NASA was established in 1958, succeeding t ...

's '' Swift''

X-ray An X-ray, or, much less commonly, X-radiation, is a penetrating form of high-energy electromagnetic radiation. Most X-rays have a wavelength ranging from 10 picometers to 10 nanometers, corresponding to frequencies in the range 30&nb ...

telescope A telescope is a device used to observe distant objects by their emission, absorption, or reflection of electromagnetic radiation. Originally meaning only an optical instrument using lenses, curved mirrors, or a combination of both to observe ...

. The explosion of the supernova precursor

star A star is an astronomical object comprising a luminous spheroid of plasma (physics), plasma held together by its gravity. The List of nearest stars and brown dwarfs, nearest star to Earth is the Sun. Many other stars are visible to the naked ...

, in the

spiral galaxy Spiral galaxies form a class of galaxy originally described by Edwin Hubble in his 1936 work ''The Realm of the Nebulae''NGC 2770 NGC 2770 is a spiral galaxy in the northern constellation of Lynx (constellation), Lynx, near the northern constellation border with Cancer (constellation), Cancer. It was discovered by German-born astronomer William Herschel on December 7, 1785. ...

(88 million

light year A light-year, alternatively spelled light year, is a large unit of length used to express astronomical distances and is equivalent to about 9.46 trillion kilometers (), or 5.88 trillion miles ().One trillion here is taken to be 1012 ...

s away (27 Mpc), was detected on January 9, 2008, by Carnegie-Princeton fellows

Alicia Soderberg Alicia Margarita Soderberg (born 1977) is an American astrophysicist whose research focused on supernovae. She was an assistant professor of astronomy at Harvard University and a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophy ...

and Edo Berger, and Albert Kong and Tom Maccarone independently using Swift. They alerted eight other orbiting and ground-based observatories to record the event. This was the first time that astronomers have ever observed a supernova as it occurred. The supernova was determined to be of Type Ibc. The velocities measured from SN2008D indicated expansion rates of more than 10,000 kilometers per second. The explosion was off-center, with gas on one side of the explosion moving outward faster than on the other. This was the first time the X-ray emission pattern of a supernova (which only lasted about five minutes) was captured at the moment of its birth. Now that it is known what X-ray pattern to look for, the next generation of X-ray satellites is expected to find hundreds of supernovae every year exactly when they explode, which will allow searches for neutrino and

gravitational wave Gravitational waves are waves of the intensity of gravity generated by the accelerated masses of an orbital binary system that propagate as waves outward from their source at the speed of light. They were first proposed by Oliver Heaviside in 1 ...

bursts that are predicted to accompany the collapse of stellar cores and the birth of

neutron star A neutron star is the collapsed core of a massive supergiant star, which had a total mass of between 10 and 25 solar masses, possibly more if the star was especially metal-rich. Except for black holes and some hypothetical objects (e.g. white ...

References

External links

Light curves and spectra
on th
Open Supernova Catalog
{{DEFAULTSORT:Sn 2008d 20080109 Supernovae Lynx (constellation)

See also

References

External links