The amazing mystery has been solved: the collision of stars leads to a supernova explosion

In 2017, a particularly bright and unusual radio signal reached Earth. This baffled astronomers – until now. team of Caltech He was able to reconstruct the story to which the reference can be traced.

About 300 years The remains of an extinct star have reached a living star. Things attracted each other, started spinning around each other, and I imagined binary star system. Could be a star’s corpse Black hole or one Neutronstern they acted. Either way, the gravitational force would be enough for the dead star to prematurely end the life of its companion.

Stern has been stripped of its atmosphere

Usually one arises SupernovaWhen a star dies. The dead star gradually robbed the atmosphere of the living star. It was released into the environment and a ring of gas formed around the binary star system.

This process increased the attraction between the two bodies until the dead star collided with the living organism and exploded into a supernova. Here, scientists were able for the first time to observe that the explosion of a star was caused by the collision of two stars.

So the puzzle has been solved

Researchers are looking at data very large array (VLA)– Telescope regularly for unusual radio signals. Especially the ones that shine like a match in the dark for a very short time but are very bright. Find out in the process Dillon Dong, lead author of the study, one of these”transient radio source“Which, however, was much brighter than any supernova detected to date.

X-rays provide the missing piece of the puzzle

Fellow Researcher Dong it’s me, later found X ray One cosmic planesReferring to the same event (VT 1210 + 4956) was due. The two events have not yet been linked. But it is now clear that the X-ray jet was ejected from the star’s core during the supernova. According to Dong, it wasn’t until years later that the material collided with the dense ring of gas that exited the atmosphere. This resulted in the unusually bright radio signal that the search set off.

So far, researchers have assumed that such events would be present, but they have yet to be observed. Dong says finding VT 1210 + 4956 was the proverbial needle in a haystack in the current situation. The study was published in Science Magazine.