Astronomers discover a pair of fates of spiral stars at our universe’s gateway

Astronomers at the University of Warwick discovered a very rare, high-mass compact binary star system just 150 light years away. These two stars are on the collision course to explode as type 1A supernovas, and look ten times brighter than the moon in the night sky.

Type 1A supernova is a special class of cosmic explosions, famous as “standard candles” for measuring the distance between Earth and the host galaxy. They occur when white d stars (the dense remaining core of stars) accumulates too much mass, unable to withstand their own gravity and explodes.

It has been theoretically predicted that white dwarfs on two orbits are responsible for most Type 1A supernova explosions. When in close orbit, the pair’s heavy white dwarf gradually accumulates material from its partner, and the star (or both stars) explodes.

The discovery, published in Nature Astronomy, not only did it find such a system for the first time, but also found a compact pair of white d-stars at the gateway to the Milky Way.

Dr. James Monday, a researcher at Warwick, and research leader, said, “As we have been expecting large local double-white d-star binary for many years, I was immediately excited when I first found this system with a very high total mass at the gateway to the galaxy.”

“With an international team of four astronomers based at Warwick University, we quickly chased the system with some of the world’s largest optical telescopes and decided exactly how compact it was.”

“I discovered that the two stars were separated by just 1/60th Earth’s distance, so I quickly realized that I had discovered the first double white d star binary leading to a Type 1A supernova on a timescale close to the cosmic age.”

“Finally, as a community, we can certainly make up a few percent of the proportion of type 1A supernovae type 1A supernovae across the Milky Way.”

Importantly, Munday’s new system is the heaviest type ever confirmed, combining 1.56 times the mass of the sun. At this highest mass, this means that no matter what, the stars are destined to explode.

However, the explosion is not scheduled for another 23 billion years, and despite being very close to our solar system, this supernova does not put our planet in danger.

Now, the white dwarfs are slowly swirling each other on orbits that take more than 14 hours. For billions of years, gravitational wave radiation inspires two stars on the cliffs of supernova events, moving fast enough to complete an orbit in just 30-40 seconds.

The third author, Dr. Ingrid Perisori, an assistant professor at Warwick University, stated, “This is a very important finding. It shows that finding such a system at the gateway to a galaxy must be relatively common.

“While finding this system is not the end of the story, research searching for type 1A supernova progenitor cells is still ongoing and we look forward to more exciting discoveries in the future.

In the case of a supernova event, mass travels from one dwarf to the other, leading to rare and complex supernova explosions through a quadruple explosion.

The surface of the mass ingestion star will first explode where the material is accumulated, and the core will explode in the second. This will drain the material in all directions, collide with other white dwarfs, repeating the third and fourth explosions.

The explosion completely destroys the entire system, and the energy levels destroy thousands of trillion times the energy levels of the most powerful nuclear bombs.

Billions of years later, this supernova appears as a very violent point of light in the night sky. Some of the brightest objects become fainter in comparison, appearing up to 10 times brighter than the moon and 200,000 times brighter than Jupiter.