Artist’s impression of an AM-CVn star system, where helium flows from one star, a helium white dwarf (upper right), onto another, piling up in an accretion disk around a small, dense primary star. Helium from the disk eventually falls onto the star, forming a shell that may end up exploding as a Type .Ia (point one A) supernova.
BERKELEY — An unusual supernova rediscovered in seven-year-old data may be the first example of a new type of exploding star, possibly from a binary star system where helium flows from one white dwarf onto another and detonates in a thermonuclear explosion. Artist's impression of an AM-CVn star system, where helium flows from one star, a helium white dwarf (upper right), onto another, piling up in an accretion disk around a small, dense primary star. Helium from the disk eventually falls onto the star, forming a shell that may end up exploding as a Type .Ia (point one A) supernova. In a paper first published online Nov. 5 in the journal Science Express , University of California, Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) astronomer Dovi Poznanski and his colleagues describe the outburst, dubbed SN 2002bj, and why they believe it is a new type of explosion. "This is the fastest evolving supernova we have ever seen," said Poznanski, a UC Berkeley post-doctoral fellow who recently joined LBNL's Computational Cosmology Center. "It was three to four times faster than a standard supernova, basically disappearing within 20 days.
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