NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope was able to capture the formation of a zombie star which was born after a weak supernova explosion. Scientists supposed that the star was a remnant of the explosion.
A supernova is a stellar explosion that can radiate too much energy similar to the Sun, which last for its life span before fading. Although there is no observed supernova that occurred in the Milky Way Galaxy, scientists believed that one occurs three times every century.
"Astronomers have been searching for decades for the star systems that produce Type Ia supernova explosions," scientist Saurabh Jha of Rutgers University in Piscataway, New Jersey said in a NASA news release. "Type Ia's are important because they're used to measure vast cosmic distances and the expansion of the universe."
The discovery of the zombie star came while the researchers were reviewing the images taken by the Hubble Telescope before the explosion. The weak supernova was dubbed SN 2012Z and is situated at galaxy NGC 1309. This galaxy is approximately 110 million light-years away.
"I was very surprised to see anything at the location of the supernova. We expected the progenitor system would be too faint to see, like in previous searches for normal Type Ia supernova progenitors. It is exciting when nature surprises us," said Curtis McCully, a graduate student at Rutgers and lead author of the study.
The team studied the object's colors and juxtaposed it with other Type Iax progenitor systems. They found out that the weak supernova which produced the zombie star has exhausted its hydrogen envelope.
The research team plans to use the Hubble Space Telescope again to take images of the same area in 2015. This will allow the team to gather clearer images because the light of the supernova will have already dimmed by then.
Further details of the study were published in the Aug. 7 issue of Nature.
