First ever 'zombie star' discovered 01:15
Story highlights
- Astronomers discover first star to explode multiple times and survive
- It may be the most massive and is the longest-lasting supernova ever observed
(CNN)It's
the star that won't die, even though it has exploded and appeared to go
down in a blaze of glory multiple times. This superlong supernova may
be the first of its kind.
When
they first observed supernova iPTF14hls in September 2014, astronomers
at Las Cumbres Observatory in California thought it was perfectly
normal. They analyzed the light of the explosion to study the material
ejected and its speed.
But
Zheng Chuen Wong, an intern at the observatory from the University of
California, Santa Barbara, noticed something strange about the supernova
and showed it to Iair Arcavi, a NASA Einstein postdoctoral fellow at
the university.
A
supernova, the massive explosion of a star, usually signals the end.
Typically, a supernova remains bright for 100 days before fading. But
this one fluctuated by brightening and dimming over the course of 600
days, according to a study released in the journal Nature on Wednesday.
The brightness of a supernova provides a luminosity equaling that of about 100 million suns.
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An artist's impression of 2MASS J2126, which takens 900,000 years to orbit its star, 1 trillion kilometers away.
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Caltech
researchers have found evidence of a giant planet tracing a bizarre,
highly elongated orbit in the outer solar system. The object, nicknamed
Planet Nine, has a mass about 10 times that of Earth and orbits about 20
times farther from the sun on average than does Neptune.
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An international team of astronomers
may have discovered the biggest and brightest supernova ever. The
explosion was 570 billion times brighter than the sun and 20 times
brighter than all the stars in the Milky Way galaxy combined, according
to a statement from The Ohio State University, which is leading the
study. Scientists are straining to define the supernova's strength. This
image shows an artist's impression of the supernova as it would appear
from an exoplanet located about 10,000 light years away.
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Astronomers noticed huge waves of gas being "burped" by
the black hole at the center of NGC 5195, a small galaxy 26 million
light years from Earth. The team believes the outburst is a consequence
of the interaction of NGC 5195 with a nearby galaxy.
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An
artist's illustration shows a binary black hole found in the quasar at
the center of the Markarian 231 galaxy. Astronomers using NASA's Hubble
Space Telescope discovered the galaxy being powered by two black holes "furiously whirling about each other," the space agency said in a news release.
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An
artist's impression of what a black hole might look like. In February,
researchers in China said they had spotted a super-massive black hole 12
billion times the size of the sun.
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Are
there are oceans on any of Jupiter's moons? The Juice probe shown in
this artist's impression aims to find out. Picture courtesy of ESA/AOES
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Astronomers
have discovered powerful auroras on a brown dwarf that is 20
light-years away. This is an artist's concept of the phenomenon.
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Venus,
bottom, and Jupiter shine brightly above Matthews, North Carolina, on
Monday, June 29. The apparent close encounter, called a conjunction, has
been giving a dazzling display in the summer sky. Although the two
planets appear to be close together, in reality they are millions of
miles apart.
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Jupiter's
icy moon Europa may be the best place in the solar system to look for
extraterrestrial life, according to NASA. The moon is about the size of
Earth's moon, and there is evidence it has an ocean beneath its frozen
crust that may hold twice as much water as Earth. NASA's 2016 budget
includes a request for $30 million to plan a mission to investigate
Europa. The image above was taken by the Galileo spacecraft on November
25, 1999. It's a 12-frame mosaic and is considered the the best image
yet of the side of Europa that faces Jupiter.
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This
nebula, or cloud of gas and dust, is called RCW 34 or Gum 19. The
brightest areas you can see are where the gas is being heated by young
stars. Eventually the gas burst outward like champagne after a bottle is
uncorked. Scientists call this champagne flow. This new image of the
nebula was captured by the European Space Organization's Very Large
Telescope in Chile. RCW 34 is in the constellation Vela in the southern
sky. The name means "sails of a ship" in Latin.
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The Hubble Space Telescope captured images of Jupiter's three great moons -- Io, Callisto, and Europa -- passing by at once.
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A massive galaxy cluster known as SDSS J1038+4849 looks like a smiley face
in an image captured by the Hubble Telescope. The two glowing eyes are
actually two distant galaxies. And what of the smile and the round face?
That's a result of what astronomers call "strong gravitational
lensing." That happens because the gravitational pull between the two
galaxy clusters is so strong it distorts time and space around them.
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Using
powerful optics, astronomers have found a planet-like body, J1407b,
with rings 200 times the size of Saturn's. This is an artist's depiction
of the rings of planet J1407b, which are eclipsing a star.
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A
patch of stars appears to be missing in this image from the La Silla
Observatory in Chile. But the stars are actually still there behind a
cloud of gas and dust called Lynds Dark Nebula 483. The cloud is about
700 light years from Earth in the constellation Serpens (The Serpent).
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This is the largest Hubble Space Telescope image ever assembled. It's a portion of the galaxy next door, Andromeda (M31).
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NASA
has captured a stunning new image of the so-called "Pillars of
Creation," one of the space agency's most iconic discoveries. The giant
columns of cold gas, in a small region of the Eagle Nebula, were
popularized by a similar image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in
1995.
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Astronomers
using the Hubble Space pieced together this picture that shows a small
section of space in the southern-hemisphere constellation Fornax. Within
this deep-space image are 10,000 galaxies, going back in time as far as
a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.
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Planetary
nebula Abell 33 appears ring-like in this image, taken using the
European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope. The blue bubble
was created when an aging star shed its outer layers and a star in the
foreground happened to align with it to create a "diamond engagement
ring" effect.
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This long-exposure image from the Hubble Telescope is the deepest-ever picture taken of a cluster of galaxies. The cluster, called
Abell 2744, contains several hundred galaxies as they looked 3.5
billion years ago; the more distant galaxies appear as they did more
than 12 billion years ago, not long after the Big Bang.
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NASA's
NuSTAR telescope array generated the first map of radioactivity in the
remnants of an exploding star, or supernova. Blue in this image of
Cassiopeia A represents radioactive material.
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A
supernova was spotted on January 21 in Messier 82, one of the nearest
big galaxies. This wide view image was taken on January 22.
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The
M82 supernova, seen here, has been designated SN2014J because it is the
10th supernova detected in 2014. At 11.4 million light years from
Earth, it is the closest Type Ia supernova recorded since systematic
studies with telescopes began in the 1930s.
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Is
that a giant hand waving at us? Actually, it's what's left of a star
that died and exploded a long time ago. Astronomers nicknamed it the
"Hand of God." NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR,
took this image in high-energy X-rays, shown in blue. The image was
combined with images from another space telescope, the Chandra X-ray
Observatory.
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The
Hubble Space Telescope captured this image of the Southern Pinwheel
Galaxy, one of the largest and closest galaxies of its kind. The center of the galaxy is mysterious,
researchers say, because it has a double nucleus -- a supermassive
black hole that may be ringed by a lopsided disc of stars, giving it the
appearance of a dual core.
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Hubble
scientists say this is the best-ever view of the Tarantula Nebula,
which is located in one of our closest galactic neighbors, the Large
Magellanic Cloud.
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Those spots on our sun appear small, but even a moderate-sized spot is about as big as Earth.
They occur when strong magnetic fields poke through the sun's surface
and let the area cool in comparison to the surrounding area.
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This
Hubble image looks a floating marble or a maybe a giant, disembodied
eye. But it's actually a nebula with a giant star at its center.
Scientists think the star used to be 20 times more massive than our sun,
but it's dying and is destined to go supernova.
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This
artist's impression shows a supernova explosion, which contains the
luminosity of 100 million suns. Supernova iPTF14hls, which has exploded
multiple times, may be the most massive and longest-lasting ever
observed.
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This
illustration shows hydrocarbon compounds splitting into carbon and
hydrogen inside ice giants, such as Neptune, turning into a "diamond
(rain) shower."
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This
striking image is the stellar nursery in the Orion Nebula, where stars
are born. The red filament is a stretch of ammonia molecules measuring
50 light-years long. The blue represents the gas of the Orion Nebula.
This image is a composite of observation from the Robert C. Byrd Green
Bank Telescope and NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explore telescope.
"We still don't understand in detail how large clouds of gas in our
Galaxy collapse to form new stars," said Rachel Friesen, one of the
collaboration's co-Principal Investigators. "But ammonia is an excellent
tracer of dense, star-forming gas."
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This is an illustration of the Parker Solar Probe spacecraft approaching the sun. The NASA probe will explore the sun's atmosphere in a mission that begins in the summer of 2018.
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See
that tiny dot between Saturn's rings? That's Earth, as seen by the
Cassini mission on April 12, 2017. "Cassini was 870 million miles away
from Earth when the image was taken," according to NASA. "Although far
too small to be visible in the image, the part of Earth facing Cassini
at the time was the southern Atlantic Ocean." Much like the famous "pale blue dot" image captured by Voyager 1 in 1990, we are but a point of light when viewed from the furthest planet in the solar system.
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NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, using infrared technology, reveals the density of stars in the Milky Way.
According to NASA, the photo -- stitched together from nine images --
contains more than a half-million stars. The star cluster is the densest
in the galaxy.
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This photo of Saturn's large icy moon, Tethys, was taken by NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which sent back some jaw-dropping images from the ringed planet.
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This
is what Earth and its moon look like from Mars. The image is a
composite of the best Earth image and the best moon image taken on
November 20, 2016, by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The orbiter's
camera takes images in three wavelength bands: infrared, red and
blue-green. Mars was about 127 million miles from Earth when the images
were taken.
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PGC
1000714 was initially thought to be a common elliptical galaxy, but a
closer analysis revealed the incredibly rare discovery of a Hoag-type
galaxy. It has a round core encircled by two detached rings.
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NASA's
Cassini spacecraft took these images of the planet's mysterious
hexagon-shaped jetstream in December 2016. The hexagon was discovered in
images taken by the Voyager spacecraft in the early 1980s. It's
estimated to have a diameter wider than two Earths.
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A
dead star gives off a greenish glow in this Hubble Space Telescope
image of the Crab Nebula, located about 6,500 light years from Earth in
the constellation Taurus. NASA released the image for Halloween 2016 and
played up the theme in its press release. The agency said the
"ghoulish-looking object still has a pulse." At the center of the Crab
Nebula is the crushed core, or "heart" of an exploded star. The heart is
spinning 30 times per second and producing a magnetic field that
generates 1 trillion volts, NASA said.
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Peering
through the thick dust clouds of the galactic bulge, an international
team of astronomers revealed the unusual mix of stars in the stellar
cluster known as Terzan 5. The new results indicate that Terzan 5 is one
of the bulge's primordial building blocks, most likely the relic of the
very early days of the Milky Way.
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An
artist's conception of Planet Nine, which would be the farthest planet
within our solar system. The similar cluster orbits of extreme objects
on the edge of our solar system suggest a massive planet is located
there.
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An
illustration of the orbits of the new and previously known extremely
distant Solar System objects. The clustering of most of their orbits
indicates that they are likely be influenced by something massive and
very distant, the proposed Planet X.
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Say hello to dark galaxy Dragonfly 44. Like our Milky Way, it has a halo of spherical clusters of stars around its core.
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A
classical nova occurs when a white dwarf star gains matter from its
secondary star (a red dwarf) over a period of time, causing a
thermonuclear reaction on the surface that eventually erupts in a single
visible outburst. This creates a 10,000-fold increase in brightness,
depicted here in an artist's rendering.
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Gravitational lensing and space warping are visible in this image of near and distant galaxies captured by Hubble.
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At
the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way, researchers discovered an
X-shaped structure within a tightly packed group of stars.
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Meet
UGC 1382: What astronomers thought was a normal elliptical galaxy
(left) was actually revealed to be a massive disc galaxy made up of
different parts when viewed with ultraviolet and deep optical data
(center and right). In a complete reversal of normal galaxy structure,
the center is younger than its outer spiral disk.
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NASA's
Hubble Space Telescope captured this image of the Crab Nebula and its
"beating heart," which is a neutron star at the right of the two bright
stars in the center of this image. The neutron star pulses 30 times a
second. The rainbow colors are visible due to the movement of materials
in the nebula occurring during the time-lapse of the image.
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The
Hubble Space Telescope captured an image of a hidden galaxy that is
fainter than Andromeda or the Milky Way. This low surface brightness
galaxy, called UGC 477, is over 110 million light-years away in the
constellation of Pisces.
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On
April 19, NASA released new images of bright craters on Ceres. This
photo shows the Haulani Crater, which has evidence of landslides from
its rim. Scientists believe some craters on the dwarf planet are bright
because they are relatively new.
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This
illustration shows the millions of dust grains NASA's Cassini
spacecraft has sampled near Saturn. A few dozen of them appear to have
come from beyond our solar system.
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This
image from the VLT Survey Telescope at ESO's Paranal Observatory in
Chile shows a stunning concentration of galaxies known as the Fornax
Cluster, which can be found in the Southern Hemisphere. At the center of
this cluster, in the middle of the three bright blobs on the left side
of the image, lies a cD galaxy -- a galactic cannibal that has grown in
size by consuming smaller galaxies.
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This
image shows the central region of the Tarantula Nebula in the Large
Magellanic Cloud. The young and dense star cluster R136, which contains
hundreds of massive stars, is visible in the lower right of the image
taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.
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In
March 2016, astronomers published a paper on powerful red flashes
coming from binary system V404 Cygni in 2015. This illustration shows a
black hole, similar to the one in V404 Cygni, devouring material from
an orbiting star.
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A new map of the Milky Way
was released February 24, 2016, giving astronomers a full census of the
star-forming regions within our own galaxy. The APEX telescope in Chile
captured this survey.
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This
image shows the elliptical galaxy NGC 4889, deeply embedded within the
Coma galaxy cluster. There is a gigantic supermassive black hole at the
center of the galaxy.
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An artist's impression of 2MASS J2126, which takens 900,000 years to orbit its star, 1 trillion kilometers away.
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Caltech
researchers have found evidence of a giant planet tracing a bizarre,
highly elongated orbit in the outer solar system. The object, nicknamed
Planet Nine, has a mass about 10 times that of Earth and orbits about 20
times farther from the sun on average than does Neptune.
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An international team of astronomers
may have discovered the biggest and brightest supernova ever. The
explosion was 570 billion times brighter than the sun and 20 times
brighter than all the stars in the Milky Way galaxy combined, according
to a statement from The Ohio State University, which is leading the
study. Scientists are straining to define the supernova's strength. This
image shows an artist's impression of the supernova as it would appear
from an exoplanet located about 10,000 light years away.
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Astronomers noticed huge waves of gas being "burped" by
the black hole at the center of NGC 5195, a small galaxy 26 million
light years from Earth. The team believes the outburst is a consequence
of the interaction of NGC 5195 with a nearby galaxy.
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An
artist's illustration shows a binary black hole found in the quasar at
the center of the Markarian 231 galaxy. Astronomers using NASA's Hubble
Space Telescope discovered the galaxy being powered by two black holes "furiously whirling about each other," the space agency said in a news release.
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An
artist's impression of what a black hole might look like. In February,
researchers in China said they had spotted a super-massive black hole 12
billion times the size of the sun.
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Are
there are oceans on any of Jupiter's moons? The Juice probe shown in
this artist's impression aims to find out. Picture courtesy of ESA/AOES
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Astronomers
have discovered powerful auroras on a brown dwarf that is 20
light-years away. This is an artist's concept of the phenomenon.
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Venus,
bottom, and Jupiter shine brightly above Matthews, North Carolina, on
Monday, June 29. The apparent close encounter, called a conjunction, has
been giving a dazzling display in the summer sky. Although the two
planets appear to be close together, in reality they are millions of
miles apart.
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Jupiter's
icy moon Europa may be the best place in the solar system to look for
extraterrestrial life, according to NASA. The moon is about the size of
Earth's moon, and there is evidence it has an ocean beneath its frozen
crust that may hold twice as much water as Earth. NASA's 2016 budget
includes a request for $30 million to plan a mission to investigate
Europa. The image above was taken by the Galileo spacecraft on November
25, 1999. It's a 12-frame mosaic and is considered the the best image
yet of the side of Europa that faces Jupiter.
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This
nebula, or cloud of gas and dust, is called RCW 34 or Gum 19. The
brightest areas you can see are where the gas is being heated by young
stars. Eventually the gas burst outward like champagne after a bottle is
uncorked. Scientists call this champagne flow. This new image of the
nebula was captured by the European Space Organization's Very Large
Telescope in Chile. RCW 34 is in the constellation Vela in the southern
sky. The name means "sails of a ship" in Latin.
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The Hubble Space Telescope captured images of Jupiter's three great moons -- Io, Callisto, and Europa -- passing by at once.
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A massive galaxy cluster known as SDSS J1038+4849 looks like a smiley face
in an image captured by the Hubble Telescope. The two glowing eyes are
actually two distant galaxies. And what of the smile and the round face?
That's a result of what astronomers call "strong gravitational
lensing." That happens because the gravitational pull between the two
galaxy clusters is so strong it distorts time and space around them.
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Using
powerful optics, astronomers have found a planet-like body, J1407b,
with rings 200 times the size of Saturn's. This is an artist's depiction
of the rings of planet J1407b, which are eclipsing a star.
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A
patch of stars appears to be missing in this image from the La Silla
Observatory in Chile. But the stars are actually still there behind a
cloud of gas and dust called Lynds Dark Nebula 483. The cloud is about
700 light years from Earth in the constellation Serpens (The Serpent).
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This is the largest Hubble Space Telescope image ever assembled. It's a portion of the galaxy next door, Andromeda (M31).
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NASA
has captured a stunning new image of the so-called "Pillars of
Creation," one of the space agency's most iconic discoveries. The giant
columns of cold gas, in a small region of the Eagle Nebula, were
popularized by a similar image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in
1995.
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Astronomers
using the Hubble Space pieced together this picture that shows a small
section of space in the southern-hemisphere constellation Fornax. Within
this deep-space image are 10,000 galaxies, going back in time as far as
a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.
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Planetary
nebula Abell 33 appears ring-like in this image, taken using the
European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope. The blue bubble
was created when an aging star shed its outer layers and a star in the
foreground happened to align with it to create a "diamond engagement
ring" effect.
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This long-exposure image from the Hubble Telescope is the deepest-ever picture taken of a cluster of galaxies. The cluster, called
Abell 2744, contains several hundred galaxies as they looked 3.5
billion years ago; the more distant galaxies appear as they did more
than 12 billion years ago, not long after the Big Bang.
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NASA's
NuSTAR telescope array generated the first map of radioactivity in the
remnants of an exploding star, or supernova. Blue in this image of
Cassiopeia A represents radioactive material.
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A
supernova was spotted on January 21 in Messier 82, one of the nearest
big galaxies. This wide view image was taken on January 22.
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The
M82 supernova, seen here, has been designated SN2014J because it is the
10th supernova detected in 2014. At 11.4 million light years from
Earth, it is the closest Type Ia supernova recorded since systematic
studies with telescopes began in the 1930s.
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Is
that a giant hand waving at us? Actually, it's what's left of a star
that died and exploded a long time ago. Astronomers nicknamed it the
"Hand of God." NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR,
took this image in high-energy X-rays, shown in blue. The image was
combined with images from another space telescope, the Chandra X-ray
Observatory.
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The
Hubble Space Telescope captured this image of the Southern Pinwheel
Galaxy, one of the largest and closest galaxies of its kind. The center of the galaxy is mysterious,
researchers say, because it has a double nucleus -- a supermassive
black hole that may be ringed by a lopsided disc of stars, giving it the
appearance of a dual core.
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Hubble
scientists say this is the best-ever view of the Tarantula Nebula,
which is located in one of our closest galactic neighbors, the Large
Magellanic Cloud.
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Those spots on our sun appear small, but even a moderate-sized spot is about as big as Earth.
They occur when strong magnetic fields poke through the sun's surface
and let the area cool in comparison to the surrounding area.
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This
Hubble image looks a floating marble or a maybe a giant, disembodied
eye. But it's actually a nebula with a giant star at its center.
Scientists think the star used to be 20 times more massive than our sun,
but it's dying and is destined to go supernova.
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This
artist's impression shows a supernova explosion, which contains the
luminosity of 100 million suns. Supernova iPTF14hls, which has exploded
multiple times, may be the most massive and longest-lasting ever
observed.
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This
illustration shows hydrocarbon compounds splitting into carbon and
hydrogen inside ice giants, such as Neptune, turning into a "diamond
(rain) shower."
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This
striking image is the stellar nursery in the Orion Nebula, where stars
are born. The red filament is a stretch of ammonia molecules measuring
50 light-years long. The blue represents the gas of the Orion Nebula.
This image is a composite of observation from the Robert C. Byrd Green
Bank Telescope and NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explore telescope.
"We still don't understand in detail how large clouds of gas in our
Galaxy collapse to form new stars," said Rachel Friesen, one of the
collaboration's co-Principal Investigators. "But ammonia is an excellent
tracer of dense, star-forming gas."
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This is an illustration of the Parker Solar Probe spacecraft approaching the sun. The NASA probe will explore the sun's atmosphere in a mission that begins in the summer of 2018.
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See
that tiny dot between Saturn's rings? That's Earth, as seen by the
Cassini mission on April 12, 2017. "Cassini was 870 million miles away
from Earth when the image was taken," according to NASA. "Although far
too small to be visible in the image, the part of Earth facing Cassini
at the time was the southern Atlantic Ocean." Much like the famous "pale blue dot" image captured by Voyager 1 in 1990, we are but a point of light when viewed from the furthest planet in the solar system.
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NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, using infrared technology, reveals the density of stars in the Milky Way.
According to NASA, the photo -- stitched together from nine images --
contains more than a half-million stars. The star cluster is the densest
in the galaxy.
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This photo of Saturn's large icy moon, Tethys, was taken by NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which sent back some jaw-dropping images from the ringed planet.
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Photos: Wonders of the universe
This
is what Earth and its moon look like from Mars. The image is a
composite of the best Earth image and the best moon image taken on
November 20, 2016, by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The orbiter's
camera takes images in three wavelength bands: infrared, red and
blue-green. Mars was about 127 million miles from Earth when the images
were taken.
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Photos: Wonders of the universe
PGC
1000714 was initially thought to be a common elliptical galaxy, but a
closer analysis revealed the incredibly rare discovery of a Hoag-type
galaxy. It has a round core encircled by two detached rings.
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Photos: Wonders of the universe
NASA's
Cassini spacecraft took these images of the planet's mysterious
hexagon-shaped jetstream in December 2016. The hexagon was discovered in
images taken by the Voyager spacecraft in the early 1980s. It's
estimated to have a diameter wider than two Earths.
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Photos: Wonders of the universe
A
dead star gives off a greenish glow in this Hubble Space Telescope
image of the Crab Nebula, located about 6,500 light years from Earth in
the constellation Taurus. NASA released the image for Halloween 2016 and
played up the theme in its press release. The agency said the
"ghoulish-looking object still has a pulse." At the center of the Crab
Nebula is the crushed core, or "heart" of an exploded star. The heart is
spinning 30 times per second and producing a magnetic field that
generates 1 trillion volts, NASA said.
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Photos: Wonders of the universe
Peering
through the thick dust clouds of the galactic bulge, an international
team of astronomers revealed the unusual mix of stars in the stellar
cluster known as Terzan 5. The new results indicate that Terzan 5 is one
of the bulge's primordial building blocks, most likely the relic of the
very early days of the Milky Way.
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Photos: Wonders of the universe
An
artist's conception of Planet Nine, which would be the farthest planet
within our solar system. The similar cluster orbits of extreme objects
on the edge of our solar system suggest a massive planet is located
there.
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Photos: Wonders of the universe
An
illustration of the orbits of the new and previously known extremely
distant Solar System objects. The clustering of most of their orbits
indicates that they are likely be influenced by something massive and
very distant, the proposed Planet X.
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Photos: Wonders of the universe
Say hello to dark galaxy Dragonfly 44. Like our Milky Way, it has a halo of spherical clusters of stars around its core.
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Photos: Wonders of the universe
A
classical nova occurs when a white dwarf star gains matter from its
secondary star (a red dwarf) over a period of time, causing a
thermonuclear reaction on the surface that eventually erupts in a single
visible outburst. This creates a 10,000-fold increase in brightness,
depicted here in an artist's rendering.
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Photos: Wonders of the universe
Gravitational lensing and space warping are visible in this image of near and distant galaxies captured by Hubble.
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Photos: Wonders of the universe
At
the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way, researchers discovered an
X-shaped structure within a tightly packed group of stars.
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Meet
UGC 1382: What astronomers thought was a normal elliptical galaxy
(left) was actually revealed to be a massive disc galaxy made up of
different parts when viewed with ultraviolet and deep optical data
(center and right). In a complete reversal of normal galaxy structure,
the center is younger than its outer spiral disk.
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NASA's
Hubble Space Telescope captured this image of the Crab Nebula and its
"beating heart," which is a neutron star at the right of the two bright
stars in the center of this image. The neutron star pulses 30 times a
second. The rainbow colors are visible due to the movement of materials
in the nebula occurring during the time-lapse of the image.
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Photos: Wonders of the universe
The
Hubble Space Telescope captured an image of a hidden galaxy that is
fainter than Andromeda or the Milky Way. This low surface brightness
galaxy, called UGC 477, is over 110 million light-years away in the
constellation of Pisces.
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Photos: Wonders of the universe
On
April 19, NASA released new images of bright craters on Ceres. This
photo shows the Haulani Crater, which has evidence of landslides from
its rim. Scientists believe some craters on the dwarf planet are bright
because they are relatively new.
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Photos: Wonders of the universe
This
illustration shows the millions of dust grains NASA's Cassini
spacecraft has sampled near Saturn. A few dozen of them appear to have
come from beyond our solar system.
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Photos: Wonders of the universe
This
image from the VLT Survey Telescope at ESO's Paranal Observatory in
Chile shows a stunning concentration of galaxies known as the Fornax
Cluster, which can be found in the Southern Hemisphere. At the center of
this cluster, in the middle of the three bright blobs on the left side
of the image, lies a cD galaxy -- a galactic cannibal that has grown in
size by consuming smaller galaxies.
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This
image shows the central region of the Tarantula Nebula in the Large
Magellanic Cloud. The young and dense star cluster R136, which contains
hundreds of massive stars, is visible in the lower right of the image
taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.
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In
March 2016, astronomers published a paper on powerful red flashes
coming from binary system V404 Cygni in 2015. This illustration shows a
black hole, similar to the one in V404 Cygni, devouring material from
an orbiting star.
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A new map of the Milky Way
was released February 24, 2016, giving astronomers a full census of the
star-forming regions within our own galaxy. The APEX telescope in Chile
captured this survey.
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This
image shows the elliptical galaxy NGC 4889, deeply embedded within the
Coma galaxy cluster. There is a gigantic supermassive black hole at the
center of the galaxy.
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"My
first thought was that this must be some nearby star in our galaxy,
just varying its brightness," Arcavi, lead author of the study, wrote in
an email. "But when we got the first spectrum of it, we saw that it was
in fact a supernova 500 million light-years away. My mind was blown.
The fact that it got bright and dim five times was very unusual. We'd
never seen a supernova do that before."
The
astronomers decided to look over archival data and discovered a
surprise: The same star was observed exploding in 1954 and somehow
survived the massively catastrophic event, only to explode again -- and
continue to survive.
"This means
that we still have a lot to learn about how massive stars evolve and how
they explode," Arcavi said. "Given that so much mass and energy were
released, if such events are common, they would also have a big impact
on their surroundings. This supernova, for example, will affect the
entire galaxy it's in!"
The star was 50 times more massive than our sun, and the explosion itself is the longest-lived ever seen.
It may be even the most massive supernova ever observed, Arcavi said.
The sheer size of the explosion may explain why the current understanding of the deaths of stars doesn't work in this case.
The same star appears to have exploded in 1954, accounting for the brightness in the image, but appears dim in other years.
The
study suggests that the "pulsational pair instability supernova" theory
may apply: a process in which the cores of a massive star reaches such a
high temperature that it converts energy into matter and antimatter.
"When
that happens, the star becomes unstable and can partially explode,
blowing off its outer parts, but leaving the core intact," Arcavi wrote.
"The star then stabilizes, and can go through this process multiple
times every few years or decades. Eventually it will explode completely.
We've never seen such a supernova before, so ours would be the first
candidate."
But there are a couple of things about this theory that don't quite match up with what astronomers are seeing in iPTF14hls.
"These
explosions were only expected to be seen in the early universe and
should be extinct today," said Andy Howell, leader of the Las Cumbres
Observatory supernova group and a co-author of the study, in a release.
"This is like finding a dinosaur still alive today. If you found one,
you would question whether it truly was a dinosaur."
The
researchers said that the energy released by the supernova is greater
than what the theory would predict. It also predicts that all of the
hydrogen would have been lost during the explosion observed in 1954, but
there was also a lot of hydrogen present after the 2014 explosion.
"If
this is the first pulsational pair instability supernova, we need to
figure out why it doesn't look exactly as predicted," Arcavi said.
"Otherwise, it's something completely new. There are no existing
theories that can fully explain this supernova, pulsational pair
instability is our best guess, but it might be something completely
new."
The
supernova is still bright, and the team will continue to monitor it. As
the light fades and the supernova expands, it becomes more transparent,
which will enable the researchers to take a closer look.
"We
might be able to see how much total mass exploded, and maybe catch a
glimpse of any internal power source that has been providing the extra
energy to power this supernova for so long," Arcavi said. "The Hubble
Space Telescope is also planned to look at this supernova in about a
month. Hubble's increased resolution could show us what the neighboring
stars of this supernova look like, and that might shed some light on
what kind of star exploded here.
"I'd
like to know how common these explosions are. Was this a super rare
beast, or will we find more now that we know what to look for?"
The
team was able to make this discovery through the robotic telescopes at
the observatory, as well as the SED Machine, designed and built by Nick
Konidaris at Carnegie Observatories. These types of telescopes are
playing a big role in pushing astronomy forward because they enable
long-term monitoring.
The SED
Machine is designed to be a simple point-and-shoot camera, and whenever a
new object appears on the sky, it provides a spectrum of the object
within a matter of minutes, Konidaris wrote in an email. Once copies of
the machine are made, they can be attached to telescopes around the
world.
"If we want to find more of these zombie supernova events, we'll need more robots to identify and study them," Konidaris said.
"This
might be the first time we've seen a supernova like this simply because
we couldn't have gotten observations like these before," Arcavi added.
"It's hard to argue with the effectiveness of robotic telescopes -- they
just open up a new window on the universe for us."
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