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Judi Lynn

(162,384 posts)
Sat Feb 11, 2023, 10:03 PM Feb 2023

Weird Supernova Remnant Blows Scientists' Minds

Fireworks display from rare dying star is unlike anything astronomers have seen

By Shannon Hall, Nature magazine on February 1, 2023



Researchers imaged Pa 30’s fireworks display using an optical filter that is sensitive to sulfur. Credit: Robert Fesen/Dartmouth College

When dying stars explode as supernovae, they usually eject a chaotic web of dust and gas. But a new image of a supernova’s remains looks completely different — as though its central star sparked a cosmic fireworks display. It is the most unusual remnant that researchers have ever found, and could point to a rare type of supernova that astronomers have long struggled to explain.

“I have worked on supernova remnants for 30 years, and I’ve never seen anything like this,” says Robert Fesen, an astronomer at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, who imaged the remnant late last year. He reported his findings at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society on 12 January and posted them in a not-yet-peer-reviewed paper on the same day.

In 2013, amateur astronomer Dana Patchick discovered the object in archived images from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer. Over the next decade, several teams studied the remnant, known as Pa 30, but the results became only more and more baffling.

Vasilii Gvaramadze, an astronomer at Lomonosov Moscow State University in Russia, and his colleagues found an extremely unusual star in 2019 at the dead center of Pa 30. That star had a surface temperature of roughly 200,000 kelvin, with a stellar wind travelling outward at 16,000 kilometres per second — roughly 5% of the speed of light. “Stars simply don’t have 16,000-kilometre-per-second winds,” Fesen says. Speeds of 4,000 kilometres per second aren’t unheard of, he says — but 16,000 is wild.

. . .



More:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/weird-supernova-remnant-blows-scientists-minds/

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Weird Supernova Remnant Blows Scientists' Minds (Original Post) Judi Lynn Feb 2023 OP
This message was self-deleted by its author Chin music Feb 2023 #1
Wow! Thank you, so much, Chin Music. Time really flies when you're having fun, doesn't it? Judi Lynn Feb 2023 #2

Response to Judi Lynn (Original post)

Judi Lynn

(162,384 posts)
2. Wow! Thank you, so much, Chin Music. Time really flies when you're having fun, doesn't it?
Sun Feb 12, 2023, 07:24 AM
Feb 2023

So easy to remember when DU appeared on our horizon. There was such a need for exactly this gathering place for people who expect more intelligence from leaders than red-faced table-pounding and sleazy theatrics.

How could any DU'ers have ever made it through "Dubya" and the rage response from reactionaries who followed when he left, and sane people rejoiced to elect President Obama? Who could have ever believed it could get worse than the early Teabaggers, and men without brains swaggering around in public showing off their great big guns, after that? What compensation?????
DU is needed now, more than ever! Whooooo!
So very surprised and honored to see your post, Chin music! Thank you.

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