Exploding star is no carbon copy
5 Jun 2009
While humans are struggling to get rid of unwanted carbon, it appears that the cosmos is really rather good at it.
New research has found that a mystery stellar explosion (a supernova) spotted in 2006 may have marked the unusual death of an equally unusually carbon-rich star.
The strange object known as SCP 06F6 was first noted in 2006 by supernovae researchers in the US taking images with the Hubble Space Telescope, seeing it appearing out of nowhere, and fading again into oblivion, over the course of 120 days.
The US team published their observations in September 2008, drawing a blank on the nature of SCP 06F6, in particular it was unclear if this event happened in our cosmic backyard, or at the other end of the universe.
Now a team of scientists at the University of Warwick in the UK believe they have come up with an answer.
According to their research, the observations of SCP 06F6 bear remarkable resemblance to a group of stars containing extremely large proportions of carbon, hence dubbed carbon stars. However, to achieve the close match, SCP 06F6 must be around two billion light years away, causing a considerable redshift in its appearance.
< The nature of the burst of light known as SCP 06F6 (left) is still a mystery.
Given the large distance, the sudden appearance of SCP 06F6 is most likely related to the sudden death of a carbon-rich star, and the team believes that this object may be a new type of a totally new class of supernova.
It would be an unusual type of supernovae in several aspects.
SCP 06F6 is located in a blank part of the sky, with no known visible host galaxy. If the star did explode as a normal supernova, why did it take up to four times as long to brighten and diminish as other such supernova and why did emit up to 100 times more X-rays energy than expected?
The X-ray energy has led to speculation that the star was ripped apart by a black hole rather than exploding on its own, but that idea still has its problems.
"Several new telescopes are now being designed and built that will continuously monitor the entire sky for short guest appearances of new stars, and there is no doubt that SCP 06F6 will not remain alone in puzzling astronomers over the coming years."
Adapted from information issued by the University of Warwick / NASA / ESA / K. Barbary (University of California, Berkeley/Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Supernova Cosmology Project).
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