Why Our Standard Candle Isn’t Really Standard

When a runaway thermonuclear explosion rips through a white dwarf star and blows the star to bits, it’s called a type 1a supernova. These explosions are incredibly violent and incredibly bright, sometimes outshining entire galaxies. Thought to occur about once every two centuries in a galaxy like the Milky Way, these stellar cataclysms are relatively frequent events.

The star doing the exploding is a white dwarf with a fairly standard mass, so the supernova’s brightness is predictable. And because luminosity decreases with distance, scientists can use the difference between an explosion’s observed and predicted brightness to determine how far away the blazing starstuff is. That characteristic has led to type 1a supernovae being called “cosmic mile markers” and “standard candles.”

There’s controversial evidence for the presence of an ex-companion star in Tycho’s supernova remnant. The explosion happened in 1572. (NASA/CXC/Chinese Academy of Sciences/F. Lu)

In the late 1990s, distance measurements based on type 1a supernovae revealed that the expanding universe is accelerating. In other words, it’s flying apart more quickly now than it was billions of years ago. Scientists still don’t know exactly what’s going on, but they attribute the phenomenon to an enigmatic thing called dark energy. The discovery represented a fundamental shift in cosmology and earned the Nobel Prize in physics in 2011.

But here’s the thing: Despite their crucial cosmological importance, type 1a supernovae are still very much a mystery. As astronomers study more and more of them, it’s becoming increasingly clear just how non-standard these explosions actually are – and how little we really know about them.

“They’re standardizable candles, not standard candles,” astrophysicist Brad Tucker told me a bit ago, while I was working on a feature describing type 1a supernovae for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Tucker splits his time between UC Berkeley and the Australian National University.

“These are very powerful tools in cosmology,” he said. “But we really don’t know what’s going on with them.”

It’s true. The uncertainties swirling around these fascinating explosions are kind of astonishing. Here are a few.

1. Until now, there was no proof that white dwarfs were doing the exploding.

For starters, we didn’t have solid observational evidence pointing to white dwarfs as the culprits behind type 1a supernovae until earlier this year, as reported yesterday in the journal Nature. Decades of solid theoretical work (and circumstantial evidence) suggested as much, but the observations weren’t there to back it up.

But in January, a star exploded in the Cigar Galaxy. Essentially next door at only 11.5 million light-years away, it was the closest type 1a supernova to Earth in four centuries. Chemical signatures in the billowing debris cloud revealed that supernova 2014J, as it’s called, is a type 1a supernova. Because the explosion was so nearby, astronomers were able to detect gamma-rays coming from the debris, a type of radiation that hasn’t been observable in other type 1a supernovae.

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