Left: Artist’s conception of pre-explosion mass loss by the progenitor star of SN 2023ixf. In the year prior to going supernova the red supergiant star now known as SN 2023ixf shed an unexpected amount of mass equivalent to the mass of the Sun. This artist’s conception illustrates what the final stages of mass loss might have looked like before the star exploded.
Right: Artist’s conception of SN 2023ixf. One of the nearest Type II supernovae in a decade and among the brightest to date, SN 2023ixf is a young supernova, discovered earlier this year by amateur astronomer Kōichi Itagaki of Yamagata, Japan. This artist’s conception shows the bright explosion of SN 2023ixf, which occurred after an unexpected amount of mass loss unlike anything astronomers have seen before.
Client
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
Project Type
Science Visualization
Category
Astrophysics
Credit
Melissa Weiss/CfA
Edo Berger, Daichi Hiramatsu, and their co-authors discovered something new about the evolution of red supergiant stars. The challenge was to visualize a phenomenon that hadn’t been observed before.
Part of the challenge was to understand how extreme and in what manner the mass loss of the red supergiant occurs.