BOOM! #Astronomers discover a brand new type of stellar explosion called ‘Micronova’ — and it looks like it’s happening everywhere.
💥 #gg tho
In a paper published a few days ago in the journal @Nature, researchers describe a small, but mighty cousin of a typical nova, or stellar outbursts in which the surface of certain dead stars, called white dwarfs, blow up. But unlike nova, the previously unknown blasts detailed in the new study are smaller and faster, burning through the equivalent of around 3.5 billion Great Pyramids of Giza worth of stellar material in only a few hours.
Video explained 👉The blue disc swirling around the bright white dwarf in the centre of the image is made up of material, mostly hydrogen, stolen from its companion star. Towards the centre of the disc, the white dwarf uses its strong magnetic fields to funnel the hydrogen towards its poles. As the material falls on the hot surface of the star, it triggers a micronova explosion, contained by the magnetic fields at one of the white dwarf’s poles.
Credit: @esoastronomy L. Calçada, M. Kornmesser
Sources: @businessinsider and @esoastronomy / visit eso.org to read more about it.
#bosplanet #breakingnews #astronomy
