Massive Star Burps, Then Explodes

gollum123 writes with a link to the Berkley site about an impressive star explosion that took place some tens of millions of years ago. We first caught sight of it in 2004, when there was a bright outburst, ahead of a massive supernova. "All the observations suggest that the supernova's blast wave took only a few weeks to reach the shell of material ejected two years earlier, which did not have time to drift very far from the star. As the wave smashed into the ejecta, it heated the gas to millions of degrees, hot enough to emit copious X-rays. The Swift satellite saw the supernova continue to brighten in X-rays for 100 days, something that has never been seen before in a supernova. All supernovae previously observed in X-rays have started off bright and then quickly faded to invisibility."

Comments

supernova burps

[Uksi]

Interesting older article on supernova burps.

Oops

[aktzin]

Is this what Sir Arthur C. Clarke meant when he said that supernovae may be "industrial accidents"?

Re:Eta Carinae Next?

[alienmole]

By all estimates I've seen, we're safe from Eta Carinae going nova. See e.g. Earth likely spared from one form of cosmic doom (NASA), which says that a supernova would need to be within 26 light years of Earth to cause significant damage.