The Hubble Space Telescope has captured a supernova three different times in its lifetime in one image. How is this possible?

Scientists have already proven for years that the further away the source of the world (in space), the older it is. Thanks to this, when we observe the Universe, we see it as it was millions or billions of years ago. Another piece of the puzzle is that light can bend A very large cosmic body.

Supernova seen in the back Galaxy cluster Abel 370. Its sheer force of gravity warps space-time and bends the “path followed by light” – a phenomenon called gravitational lens.

In this case, the light did not travel along one path, but on several paths, so that some of the light reached us earlier than the rest – the traveling light had a different travel time depending on the path. by We can observe the death of a star at three different times in one image.

Catching this phenomenon is extremely rare because it is lonely Supernova explosion It lasts from several hours to several days. It is worth noting that this image is taken from the Hubble archive. Astronomer Wenli Chen of the University of Minnesota designed a machine learning algorithm to capture interesting events captured in old photos. After “sifting” the data, further analysis is performed.

With this discovery, scientists have reconstructed the star’s transformation over time. They note for example the color change of the supernova, which is associated with a rapid change in temperature. By analyzing the rate of brightness and cooling, astronomers have been able to determine the initial size of the star before the explosion – it was A red giant is about 500 times more massive than our Sun. Scientists now have plans to use the James Webb Space Telescope. They want to “peek” into the early universe and see if older stars differ from younger stars.