Astronomers observed a red supergiant star just months before the star exploded in a supernova dubbed SN 2020tlf.
The star that exploded was a red supergiant that contained about 10 times the mass of the sun and was located about 120 million light-years fromIn the new research, the astronomers pulled together observations of the region including the supernova from a host of telescopes, beginning as early as January 2020 and continuing for nearly a full year after the explosion.
Taken together with some archival observations, all that information gave the scientists a sense of what the neighborhood is like, how the star was behaving in its final days and how the supernova itself unfolded. Particularly of interest to the astronomers were observations of the star gathered within the last four months pre-supernova, which showed extra light in the area. Observations to date hadn't given any hint that red supergiants act any differently before exploding; the SN 2020tlf activity suggests that some of these stars may put up red flags.
"It's like watching a ticking time bomb," study senior author Raffaella Margutti, an astronomer also at UC Berkeley, said in the same statement."We've never confirmed such violent activity in a dying red supergiant star where we see it produce such a luminous emission, then collapse and combust, until now."
The astronomers hope to spot more red supergiants pre-eruption to better understand the final days that lead up to a supernova event.
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