WASHINGTON: Astronomers have discovered a star in a relatively close-by galaxy that not only survived a stellar explosion known as a supernova, but also emerged from it brighter than before the blast.
The “zombie star” is here.
The star in question is a white dwarf, which is a kind of extremely dense star with roughly the mass of the sun packed into an object the size of Earth.
A white dwarf is the core of a star that, like our sun will in roughly 5 billion years, has lost the majority of its mass at the end of its life cycle.
With its powerful gravitational pull, this white dwarf, which is gravitationally locked in orbit with another star in what is known as a binary system, extracted and incorporated a significant amount of material from its unfortunate companion.
That’s where things got complicated. This caused thermonuclear reactions in the white dwarf’s core to explode in a supernova, an event that should have killed it. The mass of the white dwarf at this point was about 1.4 times that of the sun.
Curtis McCully, a senior astrodata scientist at the Las Cumbres Observatory in California and the study’s lead author
“There was radioactive material created during the explosion. The supernova’s brightness is generated by this.