Hubble Spots Star Explosion Astronomers Can't Explain

schwit1 writes: The Hubble Space Telescope has spotted the explosion of a star that does not fit into any theory for stellar evolution. "The exploding star, which was seen in the constellation Eridanus, faded over two weeks — much too rapidly to qualify as a supernova. The outburst was also about ten times fainter than most supernovae, explosions that destroy some or all of a star. But it was about 100 times brighter than an ordinary nova, which is a type of surface explosion that leaves a star intact. 'The combination of properties is puzzling,' says Mario Livio, an astrophysicist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. 'I thought about a number of possibilities, but each of them fails' to account for all characteristics of the outburst, he adds." We can put this discovery on the bottom of a very long list of similar discoveries by Hubble, which this week is celebrating the 25th anniversary of its launch.

Comments

What about distance?

[little1973]

The host galaxy is quite far from us. At these distances we can only rely on the red shift which I always thought not to be completely accurate.

So, if that galaxy is a little bit closer to us then there may not be any mystery here.

Galactic rotation at ludicrous speed!

[pr0t0]

The thing that struck me about those pics, was the distance the star moved from Jan 2014 to Aug 2014. It appeared to cover roughly 5-10% of the outer diameter of the host galaxy (although the star could be very well be deeper inside the galaxy). The Solar System takes about 226 million years to orbit the Milky Way. This thing appears to orbit at 13 years!

That makes me think their preliminary analysis of these being two separate events is correct. Although, I am not an astrophysicist, so what do I know?