A new study recently revealed a 1,000-year-old mystery explosion which, according to researchers, is possibly a rare, third type of supernova.
A Live Science report specified, in July 1054, around 700 years before the United States popped its first-ever celebratory firework, specifically, a mysterious light that exploded in the sky.
According to NASA, the blast was noticeable around the world, lasting in the daytime sky for almost a month and visible at night for almost two years.
During that time, Chinese astronomers named the mysterious blaze a "guest star," a provisional heavenly object that apparently appeared from nothing, then disappeared to nothing.
Nonetheless, the modern space telescopes like the Hubble of NASA reveal the so-called "strange guest" is here to stay, though 6,500 light-years away.
What that particular ancient blaze left is known at present as the Crab Nebula, described on NASA's website as a vast and quickly-expanding balloon of irradiated gas with a powerful neutron star that pulses at its center.
Nebulas like these are the blazing remains of what this report described as once-might stars that lost the majority of their mass in remarkable, end-of-life supernova explosions.
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Answer to the 1000-Year-Old Mystery
Many researchers are now suspecting that the mysterious light reported in 1054 was the progenitor star of the Crab Nebula, going boom, an occurrence they now label SN 1054.
However, the reason previously invisible star needs to explode so brightly and decorate the sky of Earth for so long remains a question still boggling astronomers to this date.
Now, careful research of a second supernova, one that lit up the cosmos in 2018, could finally answer that particular 100-year-old mystery.
In the study, "The electron-capture origin of supernova 2018zd", published in the Nature Astronomy journal, the study authors examined the more recent explosion's grassy remains called SN 2018 zd and matched it up with archival images exhibiting what its progenitor star appeared like before it blew its top.
Following a thorough-before-and-after comparison, the researchers discovered that this dying star exhibited all the hallmarks of what they described as a rare, theoretical supernova explosion type that has never been identified in the cosmos before, an electron-capture supernova.
Possibly the Third Supernova
When a star explodes, it usually goes out in one of two ways comprising a thermonuclear supernova and an iron core-collapse supernova.
A thermonuclear supernova takes place when a white dwarf is sucking away too much gas from a companion star.
In relation to this, the white dwarf core is heating up, fusing elements together in ever-hotter responses until eventually, the star explodes in a brilliant blast.
A core-collapse star, on the other hand, occurs when an even larger star, approximately 10 or more times the mass of the sun, runs out of nuclear fuel, leading its iron core to collapse into an ultra-dense neutron star.
Electron-capture supernovas feet between the said two categories, springing from starts or eight to 10 solar masses, not too heavy, neither too light.
Astronomers, since the 1980s, have calculated that the stars in this transitional mass range could be victim to an odd kind of date, where an overpowering gravitational force is crushing the core of the stars, leading the electrons in the core to smash into their atomic nuclei, stimulating collapse of a core, wrote the researchers.
Related information about the supernova explosion is shown on Bright Side's YouTube video below:
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