This marks the first confirmed Type Ia supernova triggered by a white dwarf star that pulled material from a companion star with an outer layer consisting primarily of helium; normally, in the rare cases where the material stripped from the outer layers of the donor star could be detected in spectra, this was mostly hydrogen.
The new discovery of supernova SN 2020eyj is evidence the companion star was a helium star that had lost much of its material just prior to the explosion of the white dwarf. “Once we saw the signatures of strong interaction with the material from the companion, we tried to also detect it in radio emission,” says Erik Kool, a postdoc at Stockholm University’s Department of Astronomy and lead author of the paper. “The detection in radio is the first one of a Type Ia supernova – something astronomers have tried to do for decades.”