Two Dead Stars Will Shine Ten Times Brighter Than The Moon When They Explode, But Humanity Won’t Be Around To Witness It
Someday, a pair of white dwarfs will meet their fate, exploding in a rare quadruple supernova that will shine 10 times brighter than the moon.
However, this event is not set to take place for another 23 billion years. By then, humanity would no longer be around to witness it.
White dwarfs are the leftover cores of stars that have released all their outer gas layers into space. In a new study, researchers revealed that a white dwarf binary star system located just 150 light-years away from Earth will die as a type 1a supernova, which is one of the most powerful types of stellar explosions.
The superdense stars were discovered alongside 33 other white dwarf binaries. The white dwarf pair has a total combined mass of around 1.56 times the mass of the sun, even though they are both about the same size as Earth.
At present, they orbit each other every 14 hours, but over time, this will reduce to approximately 30 or 40 seconds as they continue getting closer together. Once they draw near enough, mass from one star will fall onto the other and trigger the fatal explosion.
“When I first spotted this system with a very high total mass on our galactic doorstep, I was immediately excited,” said James Munday, the lead author of the study from the University of Warwick in England.
“Discovering that the two stars are separated by just 1/60th of the Earth-Sun distance, I quickly realized that we had discovered the first double white binary that will undoubtedly lead to a type 1a supernova.”
The supernova will be made up of four separate explosions. The first one will occur on the surface of the white dwarf that gains the mass, which will then trigger the explosion of the star’s core. The matter ejected from these two blasts will set off two more similar explosions on the other white dwarf.
The explosions are projected to happen around 22.6 billion years from now. That is 1.6 times the current age of the universe.
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If the event were to take place today, it would not cause any damage to Earth. But when the supernova finally does blow, our planet and moon would probably have been destroyed long ago by the expansion of our own dying sun.
Type 1a supernovas are rare, but some have been found before. Experts have suspected that most type 1a supernovas are triggered by exploding white dwarf binaries, but the idea had never been proven until now.
The new discovery gives researchers hope that more future type 1a supernovas are waiting to be detected. They may be more common than previously thought since one was found near our galaxy.
The details of the latest study were published in the journal Nature Astronomy.
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