WHAT DO YOU GET WHEN A WHITE DWARF EATS A BROWN DWARF? A VERY, VERY ENERGETIC COSMIC BELCH.
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Phil Plait
Phil-Plait-251070648641
@BadAstronomer
Nov 12, 2018
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In the year 1670, astronomers noticed a “new star” in a part of the sky that would later be known as the constellation Vulpecula (the fox). This is a region rich with stars, but few are very bright. This new star, though, grew in brightness until it reached a magnitude of about 3 (a little bit fainter than the stars in the Big Dipper), then faded away.
These types of events are called novae (literally, “new stars&rdquo
and are common events in the galaxy. One usually gets bright enough to see with the naked eye every few years or so — though getting this bright is rarer. And this one — later called Nova Vulpeculae, or CK Vulpeculae — didn’t act like a regular nova. It got bright, then faded a little, then got bright again before fading away for real. And modern observations show even more oddities (which I’ll get into shortly).
So it’s clear that something peculiar happened here. But what?
It turns out this wasn’t your usual explodey-type nova. New observations of the site of the 1670 event taken using wonderful ALMA (the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array) telescope have yielded high-resolution images of the what was left over after the nova, tracing the warm dusty material around it, and it’s so odd the astronomers have come up with a pretty wild explanation for what happened.
It looks like a brown dwarf got too close to a white dwarf and was torn apart. Ripped to shreds. And then what was left over exploded.
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