According to Kepler what are the signs that a star is about to go supernova?phyzguy said:It was caught by the Kepler telescope. Kepler measures the brightnesses of hundreds of thousands of stars simultaneously every 30 minutes in the search for exoplanet transits. This finding was an unexpected bonus.
Greg Bernhardt said:According to Kepler what are the signs that a star is about to go supernova?
During the last summer I got my granddaughter involved with NASA's stem program for Middle through High school. She was fortunate enough to get assigned the senior lead programmer for Kepler at Ames research as her mentor, I in turn was fortunate enough to get a chance to ask questions about Kepler and learned that the way they search for exoplanets is to watch for very subtle dimming of star light that occurs during transits by planets. The sudden flash of a supernova would be impossible for them to miss. Considering the relatively narrow field that they scan at a time catching the supernova was very lucky but once it occurred in the data it would have shown up like a flashbulb.phyzguy said:I'm not sure. I think they just combed through the Kepler database looking for very rapid increases in brightness. I don't think they predicted this star would go supernova - they witnessed it after the fact.