Things are heating up in the solar neighborhood: an international team of astronomers have detected a flash of light from the companion to an exploding star, the first time astronomers have witnessed the impact of an exploding star on its neighbor.
These findings provide the best evidence on the type of binary star system that leads to Type Ia supernovae, an ongoing topic of debate among astronomers. Binary stars are pairs of stars that orbit one another around their common center of mass.
The international team, including Bob Kirshner, the foundation's chief program officer for science, found evidence in the characteristics of the light from the supernova that indicated it could be caused by a binary companion.
Specifically, they found an excess of blue light coming from the explosion. This excess matches with the widely accepted models created by UC Berkeley astronomer and Foundation grantee Dan Kasen for what astronomers expect to see when a star explodes in a binary system.
"If a white dwarf explodes next to an ordinary star, you ought to see a pulse of blue light that results from heating that companion," says Kirshner. "That’s what theorists predicted and that’s what we saw. Supernova 2012cg is the smoking — actually glowing — gun: some Type Ia supernovae come from white dwarfs doing a do-si-do with ordinary stars.”
This study, published in The Astrophysical Journal, provides deeper understanding of supernovae and their use as tools to trace the history of the expansion of the universe.
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