Loading ...Unlike the above video, the best theory for what causes this type of supernova requires two white dwarfs instead of one.
In a nutshell, UC Berkeley astronomers happened upon some data that classified a supernova (later creatively named SN2002bj) discovered in 2002 as Type II, which turns out to be pretty common, and realized the brightness and duration were closer to a Type Ia. Except the whole event was about 10 percent the duration and brightness of a typical Ia.
Berkeley astronomer and professor Alex Filippenko—who, by the way, discovered SN2002bj about 3.5 hours after the original discoverers—says it’s “qualitatively different from the complete disruption of a white dwarf, known as a Type Ia supernova, or the collapse of an iron core and rebound of the surrounding material, so-called ‘core-collapse supernovae.’”
And while the data is stranger than usual, the Berkeley astronomers found a paper published before the reclassification that sheds brilliant, piercingly radiative light onto what infernal mechanism could possibly explain SN2002bj’s odd solar flare for the dramatic.
And Filippenko’s thoughts on discovering new types of supernova? “It whets my appetite for what else we might find out there with these large, wide-sky surveys … but these new surveys will find thousands or hundreds of thousands of supernovae.”
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Tags:Alex Filippenko, it blinded me with science, supernova
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