White Dwarf Stars to Collide in Catastrophic Supernova

Pictured: An artist’s impression of the center of the Henize 2-428

planetary nebula, containing two white dwarf stars. (Photo : ESO/L.

CALÇADA)

Excerpt from natureworldnews.com


Reported in the journal Nature,

the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT) in

Chile was originally studying how some stars produce strangely shaped,

asymmetric nebula. They focused on Henize 2-428 and found something they

did not expect – not just one star, but two.

“Further observations made with telescopes in the Canary Islands

allowed us to determine the orbit of the two stars and deduce both the

masses of the two stars and their separation. This was when the biggest

surprise was revealed,” co-author Romano Corradi, a researcher at the

Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, said in a press release.

The next shocker was that the two stars were white dwarfs – tiny,

extremely dense stars with a total mass about 1.8 times that of the Sun.

The fact that there are two stars supports the theory that double

central stars may explain the odd shapes of some of these nebulae.

They’ve also found that the stars orbit every 4 hours and due to the

emission of gravitational waves, they are slowly spiraling into one

another. Within the next 700 million years, these stars will merge and

under the stress of their combined mass, explode in a giant supernova.

“Until now, the formation of supernovae Type Ia by the merging of two

white dwarfs was purely theoretical,” said co-author David Jones, an

ESO Fellow at the time the data were obtained. “The pair of stars in

Henize 2-428 is the real thing!”

“It’s an extremely enigmatic system,” added lead researcher

Santander-García. “It will have important repercussions for the study of

supernovae Type Ia, which are widely used to measure astronomical

distances and were key to the discovery that the expansion of the

Universe is accelerating due to dark energy.”

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White Dwarf Stars to Collide in Catastrophic Supernova