An August Astrobite

Grad school and other things have kept me intensely busy this past week, which is why I'm just posting about an Astrobite I wrote on the 8th. I'll say upfront that I don't think this is my best work; not that it's particularly bad or under my standards for writing, I just realized over the course of writing it that I wasn't quite as interested in the subject matter as I thought when I started.

It's still reasonably interesting however, the subject matter being that when the authors examined a baker's dozen supernovae type Ia (that's “type one-A,” not “type eee-AA!”) which had been caught very early in their brightening stage they found evidence for two distinct populations when looking at the color of their spectra. “Color” in this case is an astronomical term for summing up the flux in two different filters that cover different spectral ranges and subtracting them, leaving a single number to represent the color. Most commonly the “Blue” and “Visible” filters are used to get what's known as a \(B-V\) color (visible here meaning roughly “green”), but any two filters in any part of the spectrum can work. Basically, some of the supernovae looked “red” and some looked “blue,” though the differences disappeared after about four or five days since the explosion.

Most supernovae aren't caught this early, which is why they had so few to work with despite there being hundreds of known type Ia supernovae. Interestingly, in a bit of a personal connection to the paper, one of the supernovae they looked at was SN 2011fe—which I actually got a picture of while in Hawaii! I didn't realize this until after I'd chosen the paper and started writing it up.

Messier 101 with SN 2011fe marked with the green dots.

If there's one thing I learned while doing background research on supernovae type Ia for this Astrobite, it's that we still have much to learn about these enigmatic explosions. A hui hou!