A Mysterious Star That Should Not Exist

The first images of the James Webb Space Telescope are just a week away but Hubble’s discoveries continue to be in the headlines. Now, the iconic telescope has discovered a star that survived its supernova.

A supernova is considered to be the catastrophic end of a star. It can produce radiance of up to five billion times that of the Sun. In fact, when the red supergiant star Betelgeuse undergoes a supernova, it will be bright enough to be visible during the daytime for up to three weeks. Astronomers are keen to observe these exploding stars because they provide critical insights into stellar evolution and aid cosmologists in determining the universe’s expansion rate by measuring the precise value of the most debated constant in cosmology, the Hubble constant.

But recently, astronomers have found something weird about a distant supernova. They observed that the star mysteriously survived its explosion and is now shining brighter than before. The star seemed to have tricked astronomers by faking its own death. But how is that even possible? How did the star survive the catastrophic explosion that must have ripped it apart? And most importantly, how does this discovery deepen the mystery of exploding stars?

The fourteenth episode of the Sunday Discovery Series answers all these questions.

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