Carlos Campos-Moya ’17 and Destiny Murillo ’17 never had to leave Whittier to see 130 million years into the past.
The Physics majors collected data from three telescopes to study supernovae, the explosive deaths some stars experience when their cores collapse, to understand more about the stars before they detonated. Using data from multiple orbiting telescopes, many of the stars were about 130 mega light years from Earth—meaning they were so far away, it took about 130 million years for their dying light to reach our telescopes.
“These stars are often very, very far away,” Campos-Moya explained. Standing before a captivated audience in the Science & Learning Center, he pointed to a dark screen dotted with specks of light. Each represented a source of light outside the Milky Way Galaxy, some of them distant galaxies that have stars that expired with a bang. Usually, these stars are so far away, their light doesn’t reach our telescopes. “These stars are hidden. It is only through a supernova that we can see them.”
Campos-Moya studied these distant explosions with data from the Chandra X-Ray Telescope and XMM-Newton Telescope. Murillo—who worked on the project as a junior, a year before Campos-Moya—analyzed data from the Swift X-Ray Telescope. The information they collected helped provide a picture of what’s called the circumstellar medium, the matter that emanates from a star during its life.
With the mentorship of Visiting Professor of Physics Brock Russell, Murillo and Campos-Moya found that the density of the circumstellar medium around the star decreased less steeply than otherwise expected. Their calculations took into account a reasonable assumption about the speed of the supernova’s shockwave.
“This means that something about the stellar wind changes before the star explodes,” Russell said.
The results provide a more complete picture about the deaths of these supernova-fated stars. As only undergraduates, Campos-Moya and Murillo were able to piece together these snapshots of bright, burning lives as incredibly old as they were incredibly far away.
