A Tenacious Star Validates a Revised Model of Supernovae A supernova is the cataclysmic explosion of a star. Thermonuclear supernovae, in particular, signal the complete destruction of a white dwarf star, leaving nothing behind. At least that’s what astrophysics models and observations suggested.
than it had been before. First author Curtis McCully, a postdoctoral researcher at University of California, Santa Barbara and Las Cumbres Observatory, presented these findings at a press conference at the 240th meeting of the American Astronomical Society and published them in an article in. The puzzling results provide new information about the origins of some of the most common, yet mysterious, explosions in the universe.
While they are vitally important to astronomy, the origins of thermonuclear supernovae are poorly understood. Astronomers agree that they are the destruction of white dwarf stars — stars roughly the mass of the sun packed into the size of the Earth. What causes the stars to explode is unknown. One theory posits that the white dwarf steals matter from a companion star.
“We were expecting to see one of two things when we got the most recent Hubble data,” McCully said. “Either the star would have completely gone away, or maybe it would have still been there, meaning the star we saw in the pre-explosion images wasn’t the one that blew up. Nobody was expecting to see a surviving star that was brighter. That was a real puzzle.”
For decades scientists thought that Type Ia supernovae explode when a white dwarf star reaches a certain limit in size, called the Chandrasekhar limit, about 1.4 times the mass of the sun. That model has fallen somewhat out of favor in the last few years, as many supernovae have been found to be less massive than this, and new theoretical ideas have indicated that there are other things causing them to explode.
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