Dead star resurrection! This is the first time that a dead star re-ignites before exploding!
A blaze of glory rarely seen in the universe.
Astronomers have proven for the first time that dead stars, known as white dwarfs, can reignite and explode as supernovae. These incredible images were created to show the stages of the spectacular death:
This sequence shows some of the steps leading up to and following the explosion:
- A white dwarf, a star that contain up to 1.4 times the mass of the Sun squeezed into a volume about the same size as the Earth, leeches matter from a companion star (image 1).
- The Integral measurements suggest that a belt of gas from the companion star builds up around the equator of the white dwarf (image 2).
- This belt detonates (image 3)
- The internal explosion becomes the supernova (image 4).
- Material from the explosion expands (image 5)
- This material eventually becomes transparent to gamma rays (image 6).
This is actually the sound of a supernova:
Pretty cool to know about dead star resurrection. Do you think the human soul has a second life after death?
