Scientists have found a star unlike any other one recorded—which may change our picture of how stars die.
This unusual star, 13,000 light-years away, has an elemental makeup that suggests it was formed in the aftermath of a more massive star exploding in a way that no existing theory seems to explain. According to everything else we know, the original star should have turned into a black hole instead.
The discovery may rearrange our picture of how stars explode and how some of the heavier elements are made. It also helps us better understand what the first generation of stars in the universe may have looked like.
“This opens a new window into how the most massive stars in the universe die—and thus also how the elements in the universe are made,” said Alex Ji, assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Chicago and first author on the paper, scheduled to be published Jan. 22 in Astrophysical Journal Letters.
‘Everything about it was weird’
Ever since Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar first showed that stars don’t live forever but can die, scientists have been unraveling the ways this can happen with different kinds of stars.
Today, scientists think that not only do stars explode all the time, but that this is one of the main ways that all of the elements in the universe heavier than hydrogen and helium were created.
These explosions, also called supernovae, are so powerful that they can recombine elements to create new ones. In the aftermath, new stars eventually form out of the cloud of elements left behind.
Scientists can tell what kind of elements are in a star by looking at the light it emits, so by carefully measuring the makeup of many stars, they can reconstruct the types of explosions that likely preceded them.
But while poring over data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, Ji and his team noticed a star that seemed to have unusual readings. They used the Magellan Telescope in Chile to take a closer look. Right away, they saw it was different from any star previously recorded.