The DOI matches its Crossref record; 36 of the 36 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Supernova 2007bi as a pair-instability explosion
Open accessAbstract
Stars with initial masses such that 10 ≤ Minitial ≤ 100, where is the solar mass, fuse progressively heavier elements in their centres, until the core is inert iron. The core then gravitationally collapses to a neutron star or a black hole, leading to an explosion—an iron-core-collapse supernova. By contrast, extremely massive stars with Minitial ≥ 140 (if such exist) develop oxygen cores with masses, Mcore, that exceed 50, where high temperatures are reached at relatively low densities. Conversion of energetic, pressure-supporting photons into electron–positron pairs occurs before oxygen ignition and leads to a violent contraction which triggers a nuclear explosion that unbinds the star in a pair-instability supernova. Transitional objects with 100 < Minitial < 140 may end up as iron-core-collapse supernovae following violent mass ejections, perhaps as a result of brief episodes of pair instability, and may already have been identified. Here we report observations of supernova SN 2007bi, a luminous, slowly evolving object located within a dwarf galaxy. We estimate the exploding core mass to be Mcore ≈ 100, in which case theory unambiguously predicts a pair-instability supernova. We show that >3 of radioactive 56Ni was synthesized during the explosion and that our observations are well fitted by models of pair-instability supernovae. This indicates that nearby dwarf galaxies probably host extremely massive stars, above the apparent Galactic stellar mass limit, which perhaps result from processes similar to those that created the first stars in the Universe.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Schlegel, D. J., Finkbeiner, D. P., & Davis, M. (1998) · The Astrophysical Journal · doi:10.1086/305772 · Cited by 15,126
Tremonti, C. A., Heckman, T. M., Kauffmann, G., Brinchmann, J., Charlot, S., White, S. D. M., Seibert, M., Peng, E. W., Schlegel, D. J., Uomoto, A., et al. (2004) · The Astrophysical Journal · doi:10.1086/423264 · Cited by 3,608
The Keck Low-Resolution Imaging Spectrometer
Oke, J. B., Cohen, J. G., Carr, M., Cromer, J., Dingizian, A., Harris, F. H., Labrecque, S., Lucinio, R., Schaal, W., Epps, H., et al. (1995) · Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific · doi:10.1086/133562 · Cited by 2,099
An unusual supernova in the error box of the γ-ray burst of 25 April 1998
Galama, T. J., Vreeswijk, P. M., van Paradijs, J., Kouveliotou, C., Augusteijn, T., Böhnhardt, H., Brewer, J. P., Doublier, V., Gonzalez, J.-F., Leibundgut, B., et al. (1998) · Nature · doi:10.1038/27150 · Cited by 1,921
Self-citationFilippenko, A. V. (1997) · Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics · doi:10.1146/annurev.astro.35.1.309 · Cited by 1,824
Self-citationThe Nucleosynthetic Signature of Population III
Heger, A., & Woosley, S. E. (2002) · The Astrophysical Journal · doi:10.1086/338487 · Cited by 1,669
A very energetic supernova associated with the γ-ray burst of 29 March 2003
Hjorth, J., Sollerman, J., Møller, P., Fynbo, J. P. U., Woosley, S. E., Kouveliotou, C., Tanvir, N. R., Greiner, J., Andersen, M. I., Castro-Tirado, A. J., et al. (2003) · Nature · doi:10.1038/nature01750 · Cited by 1,498
FIRST RESULTS FROM THE CATALINA REAL-TIME TRANSIENT SURVEY
Drake, A. J., Djorgovski, S. G., Mahabal, A., Beshore, E., Larson, S., Graham, M. J., Williams, R., Christensen, E., Catelan, M., Boattini, A., et al. (2009) · The Astrophysical Journal · doi:10.1088/0004-637x/696/1/870 · Cited by 1,271
Self-citationSpectroscopic Discovery of the Supernova 2003dh Associated with GRB 030329
Stanek, K. Z., Matheson, T., Garnavich, P. M., Martini, P., Berlind, P., Caldwell, N., Challis, P., Brown, W. R., Schild, R., Krisciunas, K., et al. (2003) · The Astrophysical Journal · doi:10.1086/376976 · Cited by 1,236
Progenitors of Core-Collapse Supernovae
Smartt, S. J. (2009) · Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics · doi:10.1146/annurev-astro-082708-101737 · Cited by 1,231
Cited by
Scalzo, R. A., Aldering, G., Antilogus, P., Aragon, C., Bailey, S., Baltay, C., Bongard, S., Buton, C., Childress, M., Chotard, N., et al. (2010) · The Astrophysical Journal · doi:10.1088/0004-637x/713/2/1073 · Cited by 371
Self-citation
Metadata
- Authors
- Gal-Yam, A., Mazzali, P., Ofek, E. O., Nugent, P. E., Kulkarni, S. R., Kasliwal, M. M., Quimby, R. M., Filippenko, A. V., Cenko, S. B., Chornock, R., Waldman, R., Kasen, D., Sullivan, M., Beshore, E. C., Drake, A. J., Thomas, R. C., Bloom, J. S., Poznanski, D., Miller, A. A., Foley, R. J., Silverman, J. M., Arcavi, I., Ellis, R. S., & Deng, J.
- Venue
- Nature
- Published
- 2009-12
- Volume
- 462
- Issue
- 7273
- Pages
- 624-627
- ISSN
- 0028-0836 (ISSN-L)
- 1476-4687
- OpenAlex
- W1977925093
- Cited by
- 477
- References
- 36
- FWCI
- 16.62
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Supernova 2007bi as a pair-instability explosion. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1038/nature08579
- The paper
- Gal-Yam, A., Mazzali, P., Ofek, E. O., Nugent, P. E., Kulkarni, S. R., Kasliwal, M. M., Quimby, R. M., Filippenko, A. V., Cenko, S. B., Chornock, R., Waldman, R., Kasen, D., Sullivan, M., Beshore, E. C., Drake, A. J., Thomas, R. C., Bloom, J. S., Poznanski, D., Miller, A. A., . . . Deng, J. (2009). Supernova 2007bi as a pair-instability explosion. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature08579
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
