[ ♪ Intro ]
Supernovas are some of the most powerful explosions
in existence.
Certain types also involve some of the most
massive stars,
which leave behind dense cores of their former selves,
either super-compact
neutron stars or black holes.
On Earth, we capture the light of supernovas
all the time.
But we’ve never seen the exact moment the
star collapses into its remnant.
At least, until now.
Last week, at the 233rd meeting of the American
Astronomical Society, astronomers announced
that they’d spotted what they think was
a supernova just as it was beginning to explode.
In June 2018, a mysterious signal from 200
million light years away reached the ATLAS telescopes in Hawaii.
It received the catalog name AT2018cow, so
naturally astronomers are calling it “the Cow”.
At first, it was just ID’d as a super bright,
transient phenomenon.
It didn’t quite match what we’d seen in
other supernova data,
it was much brighter and shorter-lived, expending most of its energy in just a couple weeks.
Researchers had a few different ideas about
what it might be,
like an explosion causedby a black hole eating a white dwarf star, or a shockwave generated by something else.
So they continued monitoring it even after
it had started to fade,
combining data from multiple wavelengths of light using telescopes around the world.
And eventually, they concluded it was most
likely the death throes of a massive star.
It might even be a blue supergiant star that
actually failed to explode,
but had its core collapse into 
a black hole anyway.
Now, a lot of news outlets are selling this
as way more definite,
that we’ve definitely just witnessed the birth of a black hole or neutron star.
The reality is much less certain, and some
astronomers still think it could be one of those other hypotheses.
But if the Cow does turn out to be a core-collapse
supernova,
it’s the first time we’ve ever observed the birth of a supernova remnant.
It’s also the first time we’ve really observed a baby remnant in so many different types of light,
from radio waves all the way
to gamma rays.
That initial bright glow was probably caused
by some of the star’s outer matter spiraling down toward
its newly-formed black hole or
neutron star.
There was also matter shooting away from it
at 10 percent of the speed of light.
One reason astronomers could get such a good
look was that there wasn’t a lot of material blocking the center,
the Cow didn’t eject nearly as much stellar gas while its core collapsed as other stars do.
It’s also way closer than any similar-looking
events we’ve seen,
which makes it easier to study.
ATLAS spotted it just from its usual nightly
scan of the sky.
Astronomers plan to do follow-up studies to
look for similar events with other telescopes.
But in the meantime, the universe just did
a magnificent experiment and we got to watch
and now we’ve got a lot of data to analyze.
And that’s not the only first astronomers
announced recently.
A paper published this week in the journal
Nature Astronomy describes
the very first binary star system we’ve seen where the
stars orbit each other
in basically the opposite direction as the disk of dust and matter that will one day form planets.
Not opposite in terms of backwards, but perpendicular!
So while the stars are orbiting each other
like this, the disk is rotating like this.
Astronomers get glimpses of protoplanetary
disks all the time,
they’re super important for learning about how solar systems form,
and give us hints about how ours could have formed.
This isn’t the first time we’ve found
planets orbiting a binary star system, either.
But until now, the idea that a disk could
orbit its parent stars
in a perpendicular plane was entirely theoretical.
Now that we’ve found an example in the real
world, or I guess in the real universe,
they could turn out to be relatively common.
Astronomers used the 
Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array 
down in Chile to observe the binary system
which is known as HD 98800BaBb, which
we’ve known about since the 1980s.
Specifically, this group measured the changes
in certain wavelengths of light emitted by
both the disk and the stars as they orbited
each other.
And when they calculated how each component
was moving with respect to Earth,
they concluded that the orientation that best fit the data
was that perpendicular setup.
According to the lead author of the paper,
the most exciting thing about this discovery
is that this so-far unique protoplanetary disk is basically identical to those around a single star system,
except for its orientation.
The researchers weren’t able to confirm
the presence of actual planets in the disk,
but there is a bit of evidence that suggests
the disk is taking its first steps toward making some.
So, from these strange little baby planets
to that newborn supernova remnant,
it’s been an awesome couple of weeks for watching
the birth of new things way out there in the universe.
Thanks for watching this episode of SciShow
Space News!
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new discoveries like these
or learn about some of the most incredible things in existence,
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