Hubble Chronicles Mysterious Outburst

An eruptive star that brightened to 600,000 times its initial intensity and briefly outshone all others in the Milky Way Galaxy has astronomers amazed and puzzled over what happened...The star, named V838 Monocerotis, has suddenly grown so big that if placed in the center of our solar system it would engulf Jupiter.

Comments

Larger still image

[stienman]

For those who want a screen filling larger image, 1651x1651, it is the subject of today's Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD).

-Adam

Re:Larger still image

[msheppard]

For those who failed to click this link on the day it was posted (it changes every day, yes EVERY DAY, not just weekdays, not just when the guy isn't on vacataion, EVERY DAY for like 7 years people.)

The image in question can be found at this, non-changing link:
APOD for 030327.

MMMMmmmm.... APOD.

M@

A series of photos

[barakn]

Hubble took a series of 4 photos, and you all have been looking only at the last of them. Also is a link in case you want large versions of each individual photo, and another for links for all the text, images, and video concerning the event. I'm surprised Doctor Fishboy never pointed this out.

Re:War

[Christopher Thomas]

It was meant as a joke. But maybe you can make a weapon with which you can expode a sun. Shouldn't be too hard considering the sun is one giant atomic bomb anyway...

If it's easy, it should happen all over the place already through natural processes. This does not seem to be the case (novae and supernovae are quite rare in the grand scheme of things).

Stars are very good at being self-balancing systems. As reaction rate increases, so does photon pressure, which makes the star less dense, which reduces reaction rate. This breaks down only in special cases.

Unstable giant stars, like this star appears to be, are one of those cases. Our sun may end up doing something not very different from this in a few billion years as its core runs out of fuel.

Violent explosions only occur when something overrides fusion-produced photon pressure and the star starts collapsing. This mainly happens when a star runs out of fuel, and stops again when either a new fusion stage starts, or when degeneracy pressure takes over.

Re:Any _CLEAN_ Images of this event?

[barakn]

Surprise! The "star filter" effect is in the clean, unaltered image. Your small image is just too small to show them. The crosshair produced by each star is a result of diffraction of light in the telescope. Diffraction is the inevitable result of any optical system that isn't infinite in size and is often what limits the resolution of modern telescopes (in the old days it was our messy atmosphere). Diffraction from the aperture of a telescope results in pointlike light sources being resolved as a series of circles surrounding a central dot (Airy disk). The spikes come from the supports that hold the secondary mirror. They are in front of the primary mirror and therefore in the path of incoming light. You might argue that not all stars in Hubble photographs have them. This is because the stars had to be overexposed to capture the much fainter nebula.

Re:Supernova?

[barakn]

4. The illuminated portions of the nebula actually lie in front of the star. There hasn't been enough time to see reflections from the backs or sides of the shells. The ones we've seen are, after all, 4-7 lightyears in diameter.

5. Their distance estimate of 6 kpc was a lower limit. If anything it was even further away and brighter.

a more technical article

[barakn]

Here's a link to Bond's paper in Nature.