Student Project Discovers Supernova

Less than two months after tiny Wheaton College began its supernova program, a professor and students made an exciting discovery - a brightly burning star that collapsed on itself about 65 million years ago.

The rare supernova was the first discovered by a small college program. Wheaton has 1,300 undergraduates at its campus in Norton.

Professor Timothy Barker, who founded the fledgling program, pinpointed the star.

“This star died when the dinosaurs died,” Barker said.

With the help of students, Barker spent 10 years preparing for the search project, creating a computer program that would instruct a 14-inch telescope to focus on 1,200 galaxies in sequence, one every 30 seconds.

“The significance is the heroic effort and the great job these guys did,” said Carl Pennypacker, co-director of a more sophisticated supernova search at the University of California, Berkeley. “I think it’s a triumph of will and dedication.”

In late May, Barker and his students began spending their nights on the roof of the school’s science center, looking for dying stars on a TV monitor linked to a light-sensitive camera that looks through the telescope.

If the monitor shows a bright star that’s not on the map, they have their first clue to what might be a supernova. Barker spotted such a star just before midnight on June 26, smack in the middle of galaxy NGC 4948. He said he wasn’t sure how far the star is from earth.

Spotting supernovas as they become visible is important because the bright light lasts only a few weeks before the supernova turns into a dense neutron star or an even denser black hole. And each galaxy produces a supernova only once every 50 to 100 years.

Studying supernovas helps scientists measure the size of the universe and study the birth of new chemical elements, said Bob Kirshner, professor of astronomy and chairman of the HarvardSmithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

There are two kinds of supernovas.

“One kind is from a nuclear explosion of a star, where the fuel gets burned all at once; the other is a gravitational collapse, where it crunches down on the center through the force of gravity,” Kirshner said.

Barker believes the one he spotted is the second variety, but that hasn’t been confirmed. Scientists at the European Southern Observatory in Chile did a spectrum analysis of the supernova, but results were not yet available.