Northwestern physicists make history with first X-ray imaging of calcium-rich supernova

A Northwestern University-led team researching calcium-rich supernovas have created history. For the first time, researchers were able to examine a calcium-rich supernova with X-ray imaging. This provided a glimpse into the star during the last month of its life and ultimate explosion.

Professor Raffaella Margutti

Calcium-rich supernovae are extremely rare, astrophysicists struggle to find and study them at all. Thus, the way these stellar explosions create calcium remained elusive. This new finding revealed information about the star’s final stages of life and what happens upon explosion.

Wynn Jacobson-Galán, a first-year graduate student at Northwestern, led this study. The study, “SN 2019ehk: A Double-peaked Ca-rich Transient with Luminous X-ray Emission and Shock-ionized Spectral Features” was published in The Astrophysical Journal on August 5th, 2020 and had almost 70 co-authors from more than 15 countries.

“These events are so few in number that we have never known what produced calcium-rich supernova. By observing what this star did in its final month before it reached its critical, tumultuous end, we peered into a place previously unexplored, opening new avenues of study within transient science,” shared Wynn Jacobson-Galán.

Jacobson-Galán is an NSF Graduate Research Fellow in the Margutti transients research group. Dr. Raffaella Margutti is a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and member of the Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA). Professor Margutti was also a senior author of this study.

Wynn Jacobson-Galan

Related: Calcium-rich supernova examined with X-rays for first time – Northwestern Now

Learn more about Professor Margutti and her research on her lab website.

Learn more about Wynn Jacobson-Galán and his research on his website.