Two Recent Supernovae

It’s hard to exaggerate the explosive power of supernovae. When triggered, a single supernova outshines the brightness of an entire galaxy. The explosion itself takes only a couple of minutes, but we can observe the afterglow for weeks.

Supernovae are exploding stars. Two recent supernovae have been in the news - SN2019hgp and SN2020tlf - each for their own reason.

SN2020tlf would have been a garden variety, otherwise uninteresting Type II, “core collapse” supernova if not for the fact that astronomers caught it exploding in essentially real-time. What fascinated the authors who reported on this star’s demise was what happened in the months just before it went supernova.

SN2019hgp, on the other hand, appears to be an exploding Wolf-Rayet star. It would be the first observation of a Wolf-Rayet supernovae ever made, which is important as some recent proposals suggested these exotic stars might collapse silently into black holes.

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