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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.
Maybe it's going through puberty? Explosive growth without getting any brighter =;-]
- In the beginning there was nothing, and then it exploded
While I was RTFA, I pretty much expected that this "sudden" event would be revealed as sudden only when measured in geologic or cosmic time; say, a few thousand millenia or so. The fact that this happened over only a few months is fascinating.
According to the article, this happened 20,000 years ago...
*yawn*
My father is a blogger.
42. Stay the fuck away from "V838 Monocerotis" today.
Check.
Well, that's me done for today. Time to troll Slashdot...
Opportunity knocks. Karma hunts you down.
"In fact, at present it is one of the coolest stars known," Bond told SPACE.com.
The astronomer then proceded to slick back his hair and donned a pair of shades, while rythmically snapping the fingers of his free hand.
"Oh, yeah," added Bond.
The angel in the oatmeal.
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.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
I was with Mark (Wagner) and Sumner (Starrfield) when we got the spectra. . .now I'm going to be really pissed if I'm not on the paper since I was the one taking the spectra. . .
But anyhow. . .the spectra is really interesting, there are P Cygni profiles for every emission line in the spectra (P Cygni's look like half a gaussian in emission with a sharp cutoff to be half a gaussian in absorption). This object was actually noticed by people looking at variable stars and then was picked up by some other folks in Arizona which showed the light echos even in the relatively low resolution images we got on the ground compared to our HST ACS images.
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.