NEIGHBOURHOOD BABY SUPERNOVA
A baby supernova, just over a century old, has been found in the middle of our own
Milky Way galaxy and provides an unprecedented opportunity to watch a star dying,
astronomers said.
The Supernova, known as G1.9+0.3, would have made a bright flash when it first
exploded 140 years ago but was not seen because due to dust, David Green of
Cambridge University reported.
It’s by far youngest supernova identified in the galaxy.
Green first identified the object in 1985 as a possible supernova, using radio readings
from the US National Science Foundation’s very large array. In 2007, Stephen Reynolds
of North Carolina State University looked at it using the orbiting Chandra X-Ray
Observatory. They were surprised to find it was 16% bigger than the radio
measurements.
The only reasonable explanation, in the 22 years between those observations, is that it
had grown by that rate. They extrapolated its rate of growth to date the original
explosion at 140 years ago.
The supernova is at the centre of the galaxy, roughly 25000 light years from earth. A
light year is distance light travels in one year – about 5.8 trillion miles.
-DR. NAVRAJ SINGH SANDHU, www.navraj@gmail.com