An extremely luminous X-ray outburst at the birth of a supernova
Abstract
Massive stars end their short lives in spectacular explosions, supernovae, that synthesize new elements and drive galaxy evolution. Throughout history supernovae were discovered chiefly through their delayed optical light, preventing observations in the first moments (hours to days) following the explosion. As a result, the progenitors of some supernovae and the events leading up to their violent demise remain intensely debated. Here we report the serendipitous discovery of a supernova at the time of explosion, marked by an extremely luminous X-ray outburst. We attribute the outburst to the break-out of the supernova shock-wave from the progenitor, and show that the inferred rate of such events agrees with that of all core-collapse supernovae. We forecast that future wide-field X-ray surveys will catch hundreds of supernovae each year in the act of explosion, and thereby enable crucial neutrino and gravitational wave detections that may ultimately unravel the explosion mechanism.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.0802.1712,
title = {An extremely luminous X-ray outburst at the birth of a supernova},
author = {A. M. Soderberg and E. Berger and K. L. Page and P. Schady and J. Parrent and D. Pooley and X. -Y. Wang and E. O. Ofek and A. Cucchiara and A. Rau and E. Waxman and J. D. Simon and D. C. -J. Bock and P. A. Milne and M. J. Page and J. C. Barentine and S. D. Barthelmy and A. P. Beardmore and M. F. Bietenholz and P. Brown and A. Burrows and D. N. Burrows and G. Byrngelson and S. B. Cenko and P. Chandra and J. R. Cummings and D. B. Fox and A. Gal-Yam and N. Gehrels and S. Immler and M. Kasliwal and A. K. H. Kong and H. A. Krimm and S. R. Kulkarni and T. J. Maccarone and P. Meszaros and E. Nakar and P. T. O'Brien and R. A. Overzier and M. de Pasquale and J. Racusin and N. Rea and D. G. York},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0802.1712},
year = {2010}
}
Comments
Article to appear in the May 22 issue of Nature. Final version: 21 pages, 5 figures. High resolution figures and Supplementary Information available at http://www.astro.princeton.edu/~alicia/SN2008D/ Note: the results presented in this paper are under embargo by Nature until the publication date