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Space Science

Hubble Chronicles Mysterious Outburst 52

Posted by chrisd from the formerly-small-star dept.
An eruptive star that brightened to 600,000 times its initial intensity and briefly outshone all others in the Milky Way Galaxy has astronomers amazed and puzzled over what happened...The star, named V838 Monocerotis, has suddenly grown so big that if placed in the center of our solar system it would engulf Jupiter.
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Hubble Chronicles Mysterious Outburst More

Hubble Chronicles Mysterious Outburst

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  • War (Score:2)

    by tsa ( 15680 )
    That's an alien war where one race destroyed the others' solar system.
    • My first thought was also that it was some kind of consequence of war. Although I thought of the fact that Manhattan Project era scientists were unsure whether a detoned nuke would stop, or continue in a chain reaction that would engulf the world, turning it into a second, smaller sun.

      • Re:War (Score:2)

        by tsa ( 15680 )
        It was meant as a joke. But maybe you can make a weapon with which you can expode a sun. Shouldn't be too hard considering the sun is one giant atomic bomb anyway...
        • considering the sun is one giant atomic bomb anyway...

          Wrong. The sun is a fusion rector, not a fission reactor.

        • Yeah, you could just connect a stargate to one that's already being sucked into a black hole, and then aim it for a star with one of the goa'uld motherships you have lying around all over the place...

          (btw. Sun is the name of ONE star. Use either "The sun" or "A star", instead of "A sun")

        • Re:War (Score:4, Informative)

          by Christopher Thomas ( 11717 ) on Thursday March 27, 2003 @06:54PM (#5610896)
          It was meant as a joke. But maybe you can make a weapon with which you can expode a sun. Shouldn't be too hard considering the sun is one giant atomic bomb anyway...

          If it's easy, it should happen all over the place already through natural processes. This does not seem to be the case (novae and supernovae are quite rare in the grand scheme of things).

          Stars are very good at being self-balancing systems. As reaction rate increases, so does photon pressure, which makes the star less dense, which reduces reaction rate. This breaks down only in special cases.

          Unstable giant stars, like this star appears to be, are one of those cases. Our sun may end up doing something not very different from this in a few billion years as its core runs out of fuel.

          Violent explosions only occur when something overrides fusion-produced photon pressure and the star starts collapsing. This mainly happens when a star runs out of fuel, and stops again when either a new fusion stage starts, or when degeneracy pressure takes over.
          • This is true for *EVERYTHING* today. If it exists today, then it's stable. I can think of no process that has not completed a single cycle. If my assertion is correct, then there are no unstable systems.

            The only possible exception that comes to mind is the expansion of the universe, but current data indicates that we will forever expand, and never collapse. That is the only acyslic thing in the universe. (Known to me)

            I call stabilities "reinforcing harmonics". It's a pattern of behavior that doesn't lead
        • Gravity sucks almost as much as your idea.

  • Puberty (Score:4, Funny)

    by wanderb ( 559144 ) on Thursday March 27, 2003 @07:19AM (#5605688) Homepage
    Maybe it's going through puberty? Explosive growth without getting any brighter =;-]

  • "Suddenly" actually does mean suddenly here (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ksdd ( 634242 ) on Thursday March 27, 2003 @07:53AM (#5605812)
    The star, named V838 Monocerotis, has suddenly grown so big...

    While I was RTFA, I pretty much expected that this "sudden" event would be revealed as sudden only when measured in geologic or cosmic time; say, a few thousand millenia or so. The fact that this happened over only a few months is fascinating.

    • The collapse of the core of a star as it is about to go supernova takes less than an hour or so, and it is in the shock wave of the exploding star that the really heavy elements are formed from nucleosynthesis. Not everything in astronomy works on gigayear timescales!

      Dr Fish
  • This event goes contrary to everything what is known about the star life cycle so far. The most strange thing is the luminosity and the fact that resulting object is a big star, and not a collapsed object (like black hole, neutron star or white dwarf)
    • This event goes contrary to everything what is known about the star life cycle so far.

      New physics just for this star? I doubt it.

      One reasonable suggestion without reaching for mysterious new physics is that it is part of a binary system, with a compact object (neutron star, white dwarf or possibly black hole) in a highly eccentric orbit around this main sequence star.

      Every x number of years, the compact object skids in on its highly eccentric orbit, and slams through the upper layers of the visible sta
    • This event goes contrary to everything what is known about the star life cycle so far.

      Not really. As far as I understand, it's actually pretty typical of the unstable time when a star either enters or leaves the red giant phase. We're seeing a "planetary nebula" being born.
      • Oh yeah? Then explain these quotes:

        "To create an outburst as sudden and as luminous as V838 Mon's, you have to do something pretty significant to the star," Kwitter said. "Right now we have no idea what. There are some interesting theories involving binary companion interactions or planet swallowing that may turn out to be relevant, but the truth is that nobody knows yet why this happened."

        "This object got bigger and brighter and cooler, but we don't know why," Starrfield said today. "Right now we know th

    • Couldn't this be caused due to a helium flash [gmu.edu]? I know for a short period stars which have masses high enough to burn helium undergo a very short and energetic outburst.

  • Old News... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Big Sean O ( 317186 ) on Thursday March 27, 2003 @08:42AM (#5605997)
    According to the article, this happened 20,000 years ago...

    *yawn*

  • Todo: (Score:4, Funny)

    by slittle ( 4150 ) on Thursday March 27, 2003 @09:50AM (#5606338) Homepage
    42. Stay the fuck away from "V838 Monocerotis" today.

    Check.

    Well, that's me done for today. Time to troll Slashdot...

  • Larger still image (Score:3, Informative)

    by stienman ( 51024 ) <adavis&ubasics,com> on Thursday March 27, 2003 @10:18AM (#5606567) Homepage Journal
    For those who want a screen filling larger image, 1651x1651, it is the subject of today's Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) [nasa.gov].

    -Adam
    • For those who failed to click this link on the day it was posted (it changes every day, yes EVERY DAY, not just weekdays, not just when the guy isn't on vacataion, EVERY DAY for like 7 years people.)

      The image in question can be found at this, non-changing link:
      APOD for 030327 [nasa.gov].

      MMMMmmmm.... APOD.

      M@
  • "In fact, at present it is one of the coolest stars known," Bond told SPACE.com.

    Well, it sure looks pretty damn cool.

  • Too cool for science (Score:4, Funny)

    by !splut ( 512711 ) <sputNO@SPAMalum.rpi.edu> on Thursday March 27, 2003 @11:15AM (#5607093) Journal
    "In fact, at present it is one of the coolest stars known," Bond told SPACE.com.

    The astronomer then proceded to slick back his hair and donned a pair of shades, while rythmically snapping the fingers of his free hand.

    "Oh, yeah," added Bond.
  • For those who don't know what I'm talking about, read The Fourth Profession [fictionwise.com].

  • A series of photos (Score:4, Informative)

    by barakn ( 641218 ) on Thursday March 27, 2003 @12:26PM (#5607763)
    Hubble took a series [hubblesite.org] of 4 photos, and you all have been looking only at the last of them. Also is a link [hubblesite.org] in case you want large versions of each individual photo, and another [hubblesite.org] for links for all the text, images, and video concerning the event. I'm surprised Doctor Fishboy never pointed this out.

  • it's not like a supernova. . . (Score:3, Interesting)

    by astrobabe ( 533099 ) on Thursday March 27, 2003 @01:25PM (#5608253) Homepage
    I was with Mark (Wagner) and Sumner (Starrfield) when we got the spectra. . .now I'm going to be really pissed if I'm not on the paper since I was the one taking the spectra. . . But anyhow. . .the spectra is really interesting, there are P Cygni profiles for every emission line in the spectra (P Cygni's look like half a gaussian in emission with a sharp cutoff to be half a gaussian in absorption). This object was actually noticed by people looking at variable stars and then was picked up by some other folks in Arizona which showed the light echos even in the relatively low resolution images we got on the ground compared to our HST ACS images.
    • From the paper [nature.com] in Nature, a list of the authors: H.E.Bond, A.Henden, Z.G.Levay, N.Panagia, W.B.Sparks, S.Starrfield, R.M.Wagner, R.L.M.Corradi & U.Munari

      So either you're on the paper or you're not, depending on who you are.

  • Their version of SETI @ Home involves manipulating a nearby star in a highly noticable manner. Now that they have our attention, they await our transmitted replies. :-)

    (yeah yeah, light travels too slowly, etc...)
  • While I love the Astronomy Picture Of The Day [nasa.gov] and the similarly-cool Hubblesite pics of this event [hubblesite.org], All the good-sized images have that annoying twinkly-crosshairs look to them. The Hubblesite pics include this small image [hubblesite.org] without them, but all of the large-format images that I can find have the "star filter" applied. Does anyone know where I could find a large, unaltered image or images?
    --
    • Surprise! The "star filter" effect is in the clean, unaltered image. Your small image is just too small to show them. The crosshair produced by each star is a result of diffraction of light in the telescope. Diffraction is the inevitable result of any optical system that isn't infinite in size and is often what limits the resolution of modern telescopes (in the old days it was our messy atmosphere). Diffraction from the aperture of a telescope results in pointlike light sources being resolved as a serie
      • Actually, not quite. The spikes come from overexposure of the CCD pixels - CCDs tend to bleed in two perpendicular directions when the amount of light exceeds their dynamic range (they "bubble over").

        You are correct that the "star filter" effect is the unaltered image. Bright stars "bloom" in CCD images. This's typically why you want to try to avoid bright stars in a deep-field image: the bright stars will just overwhelm the whole image. This'd happen on film, too, but CCD produces the weird "crosshair" ef
        • Since when have CCDs bled "in two perpendicular directions"? If I posted enough links of CCDs bleeding in only one dimension, would you eat a crow? From one of my favorite satellites, Yohkoh [isas.ac.jp]. From a random web page [uiuc.edu]. A great shot of the infamous UFOs [nasa.gov] from SOHO. And finally, from the Hubble website itself, a great example [hubblesite.org] of CCD bleed and diffraction spikes in the same photo! The CCD bleed is the bar, and the diffraction spikes are the crosshairs. Check your facts before you post.

  • a more technical article (Score:3, Informative)

    by barakn ( 641218 ) on Thursday March 27, 2003 @09:18PM (#5611749)
    Here's a link to Bond's paper [nature.com] in Nature.
  • A super nova would be the coolest thing ever as it would light up a large area of the sky for about a year. But then again, a supernova might not be to friendly for all the aliens. Damn aliens, making all our fun into a giant guilt trip. Hoch

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