Astronomers have flushed a cosmic explosion old of 10.5 billion years

News 20 February, 2018

NASA

AFP

Tuesday, February 20, 2018 08:01

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Tuesday, February 20, 2018 08:05

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PARIS | An enormous cosmic explosion old of 10.5 billion years ago: astronomers announced Tuesday they discovered the supernova, a star at the end of life, the most distant ever detected.

“DES16C2nm (the name given to this supernova, ed) is extremely distant, extremely bright and extremely rare, not the kind of thing that, as an astronomer, you fall all the days,” says Mathew Smith, lead author of the study, in a press release from the University of Southampton (United Kingdom).

The phenomenon occurs when a massive star nestled in a galaxy far away has put an end to his life in a cataclysmic explosion known as a supernova.

The phenomena which accompany the death of a star are very violent, because the material component of the star is ejected at speeds of several thousand kilometers per second. The fact of the incredible amount of energy released, the event shines as much as… of 200 million suns and can be seen from the Earth.

The light emitted by the celestial phenomenon has reached our planet 10.5 billion years after it has occurred and has been detected for the first time in August 2016. Its distance and its extreme brightness were then confirmed in October 2017 by three separate apertures.

The international team of astronomers led by the University of Southampton and the origin of the study published Tuesday in the Astrophysical Journal has ranked the small-last one of the ” supernovas super bright (SLSN) “, the class of supernovae the most brilliant and most rare.

“In addition to being a discovery very exciting, the extreme distance of DES16C2nm gives us a unique insight into the nature of supernovae super bright,” said Mathew Smith.

“The ultraviolet light emitted by this supernova tells us how the quantity of metal produced in the explosion and on the temperature of the explosion itself, two essential information to understand the causes, the engines, of these cosmic explosions “, he adds.