CANADA: Three supernovae imaged by the Hubble telescope involved “exiled” stars flung out of their home galaxies millions or even billions of years ago to end their lives in fiery explosions in the emptiness of intergalactic space, astronomers say.
Most supernovae occur within galaxies possessing hundreds of billions of stars, where perhaps one might explode as a supernova every century.
However, the three supernovae discovered several years ago and caught in detailed images by the Hubble Space Telescope were in the dark emptiness between three giant clusters with several thousand galaxies each, a study led by the University of California, Berkeley, found.
The stars’ nearest neighbors at the time of their explosive deaths were around 300 light years away; that’s almost 100 times the distance to our own sun’s nearest cosmic neighbor, the star Proxima Centauri.
If any of the exploding stars had planets — which would have been incinerated in the supernovae — they would have experienced night skies without any bright stars, since the density of stars in interstellar space is about a millionth of what we observe from the Earth, says study leader Melissa Graham.
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