Rare 'hypernova' explosion detected on fringes of the Milky Way for the first time

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The catastrophic blast was 10 times stronger and brighter than a typical supernova.

An artist's impression of the early universe, around the time of the elusive hypernova explosion.
An artist's impression of the early universe, around the time of the elusive hypernova explosion. (Image credit: NASA/ Adolf Schaller)

Scientists have found evidence of a rare, gargantuan stellar explosion, dating to the earliest days of the universe — less than a billion years after the Big Bang.

Known as a "magneto-rotational hypernova," this ancient explosion would have been roughly 10 times brighter and more energetic than a typical supernova (the violent death that awaits many of the largest stars in the universe), leaving behind a strange stew of elements that helped fuel the next generation of stars.

"It's an explosive death for the star, [and] no one's ever found this phenomenon before," Yong said.

In their new study, the researchers closely analyzed the star's chemical composition based on the wavelengths of light it emits, using special instruments on the Giant Magellan Telescope in the Atacama Desert, Chile. They found that, unlike most other known stars dating to this early era, J2 contains extremely low amounts of iron, while boasting unusually high amounts of heavier elements such as zinc, uranium and europium.

Mergers between neutron stars (collapsed husks of giant stars that pack a sun's-worth of mass into an area the size of a city) can explain the presence of these heavier elements in similar stars from the early universe — however, the researchers said, J2 contains so many "extra" heavy elements that even the neutron star merger theory doesn't fit.

"We now find the observational evidence for the first time directly indicating that there was a different kind of hypernova producing all stable elements in the periodic table at once — a core-collapse explosion of a fast-spinning, strongly-magnetized massive star," study co-author Chiaki Kobayashi of the University of Hertfordshire in the U.K. said in the statement. "It is the only thing that explains the results."

This discovery is more than a sparkly spectacle; such an incredible explosion must have occurred during the earliest stages of galaxy formation to result in the birth of J2. This fact suggests that hypernovas may have been an important method of star formation in the early universe, the study authors concluded. The detection of similarly old, oddly composed stars is needed to further flesh out these results.

Editor's note: This article was corrected on July 19 to remove a claim that Earth's sun will go supernova someday. In fact, Earth's sun has too little mass to explode in this way.

Originally published on Live Science.

Brandon Specktor
Brandon Specktor
Editor

Brandon is the space / physics editor at Live Science. With more than 20 years of editorial experience, his writing has appeared in The Washington Post, Reader's Digest, CBS.com, the Richard Dawkins Foundation website and other outlets. He holds a bachelor's degree in creative writing from the University of Arizona, with minors in journalism and media arts. His interests include black holes, asteroids and comets, and the search for extraterrestrial life.