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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.
It just means there are more things in space that we don't fully understand yet. But every discovery adds knowledge so we can understand it better.
~~
Probably some long-forgotten interstellar war.
In a galaxy far, far away, Princess Leia turned her head away while Darth Vader took out his anger at the old empire for taking away his hot grits.
Can't remember where I parked my star class death star..... Did I go on a bender last night.... time to lay off the sauce.
Just saying, maybe it's not a natural event.
Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature.
Its the fallout from when Scientists on the planet Zergoblott 3 restarted their new collider, apparantly quite common throughout the universe once you know what to look for.
A wizard did it.
A new type of star !
It IS actually A long time ago in a galaxy far away
Let's put the genes back in Genesis.
Then it must have been a mininova.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
I'm not saying I didn't do this. I just have trouble controlling my temper sometimes. Bad day at work, OK?
Perhaps this is the first time we record a Leviathan entering on Starbust. Astrobiologists should analise this.
It's just the the Dark Star hippies blowing up unstable stars for fun & profit.
It's Praxis of course. Time to make a peace treaty?
Time to plan for endless Christmas.
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.
Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer. - Ludwig von Mises
...came the Lexx, to our dark universe of evil and depravity, destroying the twin worlds of Fire and Water.
Donald Trump, on a crusade to make Nixon look respectable
Ten times fainter? "One tenth as bright" reads better and makes more sense.
In electrical engineering, there is something called admittance, which is the inverse of impedance. Are there similar inverse terms for radiometry? If so, then "ten times fainter" makes sense, because it would be using a "faintness" scale that is established.
"Stop failing the Turing test!" -- Dilbert
It is the remains of a star system whose inhabitants were unwilling to build laser cannons for The Monks (see "The Fourth Profession" by Larry Niven).
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled"
It's quite simple. First, the star underwent a small blast, too small to be detected, in which it expelled a layer of gas. That gas formed a cloud around the star. Then, there was an ordinary blast. What we saw was the gas cloud being illuminated by the ordinary blast.
The faint burst might be from the extra stellar activity from starlifitng all the material needed to make the dyson sphere.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
Are you sure it would make sense? If you said 10% fainter how many times fainter would that be?
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
Supernova, ordinary nova, and inbetween the newly discovered bossa-nova.
Why do I have to explain everything every time?
What if the star was a normal supernovae but had a companion black hole? Wouldn't that make the light fade prematurely?
10%
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
If the starwars stuff gets +1 the comment above should at least get +2.
It must have been a champagne supernova in the sky.
I looked at the picture given in TFA and it looks to me that the host galaxy of this mysterious non-nova, non-supernova explosion is a background galaxy, lensed by the foreground cluster. It does not look like a member of this foreground cluster.
I would say, distance estimates for such background galaxies are not particularly easy to make.
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?
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
Could also just be construction work on an interstellar highway.
Obviously Soren has something to do with it...
There's a war out there...
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Briefly.
I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I feared something terrible has happened, but dismissed it as the burrito I had for lunch at the Taco Bell. It does really look like some planet *was* destroyed. mm.. Should learn to trust the Force more.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
This is more a limitation of the researcher than of the science. This type of Short duration hyperbright nova is not unknown and elsewhere in the literature there are several theories as to their Natural origins. They have been a few detected over the last 50 years but because of their rarity a comprehensive analysis is still wanting.
So this is not a NEW HUBBLE DISCOVERY, more a OH NICE! you saw one too.
Considering that this happened far, far away, and therefore long, long ago; I think we all know who was responsible. http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki...
Vogon poetry is of course, the third worst in the universe. The second worst is that of the Azgoths of Kria. During a recitation by their poet master Grunthos the Flatulent of his poem "Ode to a Small Lump of Green Putty I Found in My Armpit One Midsummer Morning", four of his audience died of internal hemorrhaging and the president of the Mid-Galactic Arts Nobbling Council survived only by gnawing one of his own legs off. Grunthos was reported to have been "disappointed" by the poem's reception, and was about to embark on a reading of his 12-book epic entitled "My Favourite Bathtime Gurgles" when his own major intestine - in a desperate attempt to save life itself - leapt straight up through his neck and throttled his brain. The very worst poetry of all perished along with its creator, Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings of Sussex, in the destruction of the planet Earth. Vogon poetry is mild by comparison.
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A big boom, but not quite big enough to destroy the star? Perhaps the Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator just got misdirected to the wrong location?
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Based on the most prominent modern science, it was either dark matter that caused the unusual result or the aliens that built the pyramids accidentally crashed their spaceship into the star, causing a mini-nova.
A British voice was heard saying...
"And here's where he lives..." (some sort of bang)
"And here's his neighbor..." (bang again)
"And here's his neighbor's summer home..." (bang and some thumps)
"And here's the town by the beach - tropical island - the whole planet he lived on!"
The bangs became curiously long and bass-level, and the voice broke off into maniacal cackling.
The deathstar exploded
Maybe it was a Deathstar
There was always something fishy about those ruins.
0.1 times fainter, or 1.0/1.1 ~= 0.90909 times as bright. There is a problem in that colloquially a linear scale is assumed for small percentages, and with that assumption 10% fainter means 0.9 times as bright.
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...is that you get to speculate more wildly. Suppose two stars that are not yet (or never could be) able to supernova, smacked into each other at some very impressive clip. Their cores interact and there is briefly a mass in a state for a supernova...which is blown apart in the early seconds of the supernova because uniquely, the relevant core material is asymmetric and the two lobes are separated.
Is that possible? Is it gibberish? I don't know, because I never studied astronomy except by watching, well, umm...Nova, ironically enough.
So there's a lesson for you kids: don't study too hard, just read a lot of science fiction. You'll be dumber, but still have fun.
A "not quite super nova"
http://i.cubeupload.com/T6cyLu.png