A shock flash breaking out of a dusty red supergiant
Shock-breakout emission is light that arises when a shockwave, generated by the core-collapse explosion of a massive star, passes through its outer envelope. Hitherto, the earliest detection of such a signal was at several hours after the explosion1, although a few others had been reported2–7. The temporal evolution of early light curves should provide insights into the shock propagation, including explosion asymmetry and environment in the vicinity, but this has been hampered by the lack of multiwavelength observations. Here we report the instant multiband observations of a type II supe...
Source: nature.com