An extremely luminous X-ray outburst at the birth of a supernova

Soderberg, A. M.; Berger, E.; Page, K. L.; Schady, P.; Parrent, J.; Pooley, D.; Wang, X.-Y.; Ofek, E. O.; Cucchiara, A.; Rau, A.; Waxman, E.; Simon, J. D.; Bock, D. C.-J.; Milne, P. A.; Page, M. J.; Barentine, J. C.; Barthelmy, S. D.; Beardmore, A. P.; Bietenholz, M. F.; Brown, P.; Burrows, A. S.; Burrows, D. N.; Byrngelson, G.; Cenko, S. B.; Chandra, P.; Cummings, J. R.; Fox, D. B.; Gal-Yam, A.; Gehrels, N.; Immler, S.; Kasliwal, M.; Kong, Albert K. H.; Krimm, H. A.; Kulkarni, S. R.; Maccarone, T. J.; Mészáros, P.; Nakar, E.; O'Brien, P. T.; Overzier, R. A.; de Pasquale, M.; Racusin, J.; Rea, N.; York, D. G.

doi:10.1038/nature06997

Published May 22, 2008 | Version Supplemental Material + Submitted

Journal Article Open

An extremely luminous X-ray outburst at the birth of a supernova

1. Princeton University
2. Carnegie Observatories
3. University of Leicester
4. University College London
5. Dartmouth College
6. University of Wisconsin–Madison
7. Nanjing University
8. California Institute of Technology
9. Pennsylvania State University
10. Weizmann Institute of Science
11. University of California, Berkeley
12. University of Arizona
13. The University of Texas at Austin
14. Goddard Space Flight Center
15. York University
16. Clemson University
17. University of Virginia
18. National Tsing Hua University
19. Universities Space Research Association
20. University of Southampton
21. Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics
22. University of Amsterdam
23. University of Chicago

Massive stars end their short lives in spectacular explosions—supernovae—that synthesize new elements and drive galaxy evolution. Historically, supernovae were discovered mainly through their 'delayed' optical light (some days after the burst of neutrinos that marks the actual event), preventing observations in the first moments following the explosion. As a result, the progenitors of some supernovae and the events leading up to their violent demise remain intensely debated. Here we report the serendipitous discovery of a supernova at the time of the explosion, marked by an extremely luminous X-ray outburst. We attribute the outburst to the 'break-out' of the supernova shock wave from the progenitor star, and show that the inferred rate of such events agrees with that of all core-collapse supernovae. We predict that future wide-field X-ray surveys will catch each year hundreds of supernovae in the act of exploding.

Additional Information

© 2008 Macmillan Publishers Limited. Received 11 February; accepted 4 April 2008. This Article is based in part on observations obtained at the Gemini Observatory through the Director's Discretionary Time. Gemini is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under a cooperative agreement with the NSF on behalf of the Gemini partnership: the NSF (US), the STFC (UK), the NRC (Canada), CONICYT (Chile), the ARC (Australia), CNPq (Brazil) and SECYT (Argentina). The VLA is operated by NRAO, a facility of the NSF operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc. Some of the data presented herein were obtained at the W. M. Keck Observatory, which is operated as a scientific partnership among the California Institute of Technology, the University of California and NASA. The Observatory was made possible by the financial support of the W. M. Keck Foundation. A.M.S. acknowledges support by NASA through a Hubble Fellowship.

Errata

Corrigendum Nature 454, 246 (10 July 2008) | doi:10.1038/nature07134 An extremely luminous X-ray outburst at the birth of a supernova A. M. Soderberg, E. Berger, K. L. Page, P. Schady, J. Parrent, D. Pooley, X.-Y. Wang, E. O. Ofek, A. Cucchiara, A. Rau, E. Waxman, J. D. Simon, D. C.-J. Bock, P. A. Milne, M. J. Page, J. C. Barentine, S. D. Barthelmy, A. P. Beardmore, M. F. Bietenholz, P. Brown, A. Burrows, D. N. Burrows, G. Bryngelson, S. B. Cenko, P. Chandra, J. R. Cummings, D. B. Fox, A. Gal-Yam, N. Gehrels, S. Immler, M. Kasliwal, A. K. H. Kong, H. A. Krimm, S. R. Kulkarni, T. J. Maccarone, P. Mészáros, E. Nakar, P. T. O'Brien, R. A. Overzier, M. de Pasquale, J. Racusin, N. Rea & D. G. York Nature 453, 469–474 (2008) In this Article, the surname of co-author G. Bryngelson was mis-spelled as G. Byrngelson.

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Eprint ID: 73180
Resolver ID: CaltechAUTHORS:20170103-133236419

Describes: 10.1038/nature07134 (DOI); https://arxiv.org/abs/0802.1712 (URL)

W. M. Keck Foundation
NASA Hubble Fellowship

Created: 2017-01-03

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Caltech groups: Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences (GPS)

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An extremely luminous X-ray outburst at the birth of a supernova

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