This Weird Star Survived a Supernova Only to Shine Even More Brightly Than Before

Nothing compares to the end of a white dwarf. Their thermonuclear self-destruction is one of the most powerful detonations in the universe.

That is the idea. Some white dwarfs faked their deaths and went on to shine brighter than before.

A decade ago, a supernova named 2012Z was spotted in a spiral galaxy, and it should be seen as a sign of its demise.

It took a long time for images of its home galaxy to go back, so it was necessary to look at follow-up images to see the empty spaces.

When we got the most recent Hubble data, we were expecting to see something. The astronomer says the star we saw in the pre-explosion images wasn't the one that blew up.

Nobody was expecting a star to be that bright. That was a challenge.

A star with our Sun's mass collapses into a dense, white-hot sphere the size of our Earth. Without mass to build bigger elements, it cools down and becomes a black lump.

Life might go on a bit longer if the stellar core has a companion star nearby.

A type Ia supernova happens when all that extra mass pushes the carbon into fusion and causes a huge amount of energy to be released in a blink.

Usually, the space once occupied by the white dwarf is just an expanding cloud of star guts floating out into the universe.

These blasts are so clockwork that they all burn at the same brilliance, making them useful for measuring distances.

Not every explosion is so standard. The more common Type Iax supernova are more like damp squibs than they are like fireworks.

There are signs of high density matter and a thick photoosphere seen in the aftermath of a few less impressive supernovae.

The Astrophysical Journal is a journal.

There are color images of NGC 1309 before and after a storm. The Hubble Heritage image was taken before the explosion. A zoom-in on the position of the supernova can be seen in the top middle panel. The 2012 visit is shown in the top right. The location of SN 2012Z is shown in the middle- bottom panel. The differences between the pre-explosion images and the observations from 2016 are shown in the bottom right panel.

Even after going thermonuclear, white dwarfs can still be intact.

It's not clear why this star fell short of ripping itself apart but still came back brighter. The researchers believe the blast caused the material to settle back into a puffed up form.

The white dwarf's cooling remains would look better with a bigger volume.

The implications forType Ia supernovae are profound.

It has been found that supernovae can grow to the limit. The blasts are weak at times. We need to understand what makes a supernova fail and what makes someone successful as a type Ia.

This research was published in a scientific journal.