(ORDO NEWS) — A recent study on neutrinos, precede supernova explosion – the tiny particles, the presence of which is very difficult to fix – helped scientists to become one step closer to unlocking the secrets of the last stages of stellar evolution.
This study, co-authored by Ryosuke Hirai of ARC Center of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav) at Monash University, Australia, analyzed the possibility of predicting supernova explosions by measuring the parameters of neutrino fluxes emitted by a star shortly before her final blast.
When a star dies, it emits a huge amount of neutrinos. These neutrinos freely pass through the entire star before the explosion reaches its surface. Scientists can detect these neutrinos before a supernova burst occurs; in fact, several dozens of neutrinos were detected from the side of the supernova, which broke out in 1987, a few hours before the detection of the flare in the optical range.
The next generation of neutrino detectors is expected to detect about 50,000 neutrinos emitted from similar supernovae. This technology has become so effective that scientists can detect weak neutrino signals emitted several days before a supernova explosion.
In their work, Hirai and his colleagues studied several models of the evolution of stars in the last stages of their life cycle, analyzing the parameters of neutrino fluxes formed at these stages, and then compared the results with the observational data. The analysis was carried out for a star with a mass of 15 solar masses.
The results showed a strong dependence of the emerging neutrino flux on the type of star evolution model used. These findings will make it possible to more effectively predict a supernova outbreak with neutrinos, so that scientists can witness its appearance in the sky. In addition, this method is one of the few methods for directly obtaining information about the star’s core, the authors explained.
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