Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

CTOnews.com, May 30 (Xinhua) Japanese astronomer Gongichi Banyuan has discovered an extremely rare supernova in the spiral galaxy M101, which is only 2100 light-years from Earth. It is the closest supernova in the past five years and the second closest supernova in the past decade.

The supernova, named SN 2023ixf, is an II supernova caused by the collapse of a star at least eight times the mass of the sun after running out of nuclear fuel. Such explosions produce strange celestial bodies such as neutron stars or black holes and throw out large amounts of matter and radiation.

The SN 2023ixf has a brightness of 14.9 magnitude, so it can be seen with amateur telescopes. Kongichi Panagaki is a veteran supernova discoverer who has discovered 172 supernovae since 2000. He discovered the supernova on the evening of May 19 and located it in automatic images from the California Institute of Technology's Zwicky transient facility (ZTF) within two days. He said it only took him five minutes to confirm that it was a supernova and that he was lucky because the weather was bad and there were many clouds.

CTOnews.com noted that the discovery has aroused great interest in the scientific community, and many astronomers have deployed various available telescopes to observe the astronomical event and share the data they have collected. Yvette Cendes, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said she was too excited to fall asleep and had arranged plans to use radio telescopes to study supernovae. "collecting data is the most important thing right now," she said. "

The study of such a near and young II supernova may provide new clues to how massive stars die and how strange objects such as neutron stars and black holes are produced. Shrinivas Kulkarni, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology, said, "understanding the death of these massive stars has plagued astronomers for 50 or 60 years because it is the entrance to the formation of neutron stars and black holes."

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