Artistic view of the aftermath of a supernova explosion, with an unexpected white dwarf remnant. These super-dense but no longer active stars are thought to play a key role in many supernovae explosion. (Copyright Russell Kightley)
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White dwarf stars, the remnant cores of low-mass stars that have exhausted all their nuclear fuel, are among the most dense objects in the sky.
Their mass is comparable to that of the sun, while their volume is comparable to that of Earth. Very roughly, this means the average density of matter in a white dwarf would be on the order of 1,000,000 times greater than the average density of the sun.
Thought to be the final evolutionary state of stars whose mass is not high enough to become a neutron star — a category that includes the sun and over 97% of the other stars in the Milky Way — they are dim objects first identified a century ago but only in the last decade the subject of broad study.
In recent years the white dwarfs have become more and more closely associated with supernovae explosions, though the processes involved remained hotly debated. A team using the Hubble Space Telescope even captured before and after images of what is hypothesized to be an incomplete white dwarf supernova. What was left behind has been described by some as a “zombie star.”
Now a team of astronomers led by Stephane Vennes of the Czech Academy of Sciences has detected another zombie white dwarf, LP-40-365 , that they put forward as a far-flung remnant of a long-ago supernova explosion. This is considered important and unusual because it would represent a first detection of such a remnant long after the supernova conflagration.
This dynamic is well captured in an animation accompanying the Science paper that describes the possible remnant. Here’s the animation and a second-by-second description of what is theorized to have occurred:
00.0 sec: Initial binary star outside the disk of the Milky Way galaxy. A massive white dwarf accreting
material through an accretion disk from its red giant companion star. The stars orbit around the center of
mass of the binary system.
14.6 sec: The white dwarf reaches the Chandrasekhar mass limit and explodes as a bright Type Ia
supernova. However, the explosion is not perfect; a fraction of the white dwarf shoots out like a shrapnel to the left. The binary system disrupts.
18.0 sec: The supernova explosion again, at an edge – on view.
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