The team led by dr. hab. Michał Michałowski from the AOI AMU has discovered large amounts of atomic gas in the environment of an explosion of a relativistic supernova 2009bb type Ic. These supernovae explode when the most massive stars in the Universe die (several tens times more massive than the Sun). This is the first time when atomic gas in the environment of a supernova explosion has been studied. This discovery brings us closer to the full understanding of stellar explosions, because the concentration of gas in this case suggests that stars exploding as this kind of supernovae are formed when gas flows into a galaxy from the space between galaxies. This will also allow us to study gas inflows into galaxies using supernovae.
The research paper is available on the webpage: https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.00977
The research of dr. hab. Michał Michałowski is supported by the National Science Centre, Poland through the POLONEZ grant 2015/19/P/ST9/04010; this project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 665778.
2018-08-08, MM