A team of astronomers has located a system that has likely left behind a "zombie star" after an uncommon weak supernova explosion. To spot the system, the team used NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.
This is a strange occurrence because typically, a supernova tends to utterly destroy an exploding dying star. However, in this particular instance, it would appear the supernova left behind a portion of the dying star; this is what scientists refer to as zombie star.
The team of scientists managed to come across the zombie star after examining images taken by Hubble years in the past that happened before the stellar explosion. The astronomers spotted a blue star feeding its energy to a white dwarf, a development that created a nuclear reaction which later released the weak supernova explosion.
"Astronomers have been searching for decades for the star systems that produce Type Ia supernova explosions," said scientist Saurabh Jha of Rutgers University in Piscataway, New Jersey.
We understand the weak supernova took place in the host galaxy NGC 1309. This host galaxy is 110 million light-years away from Earth, and was discovered back in 2012 in the Lick Observatory Supernova Search. Since Hubble was observing NGC 1309 several years before the outburst of the Supernova, scientists were able to examine before and after images.
Still, locating the zombie star took some slight doing. A graduate student at Rutgers who goes by the name Curtis McCully had to sharpen the images after the explosion to spot the zombie star close to the supernova.
More work needed to be done to make sure, however. The team had to observe the color of the object along with comparing it with computer simulations. It was a lot of hard work, but it paid off in the end as it should.
"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," McCully said.
The team is making plans to observe the area again in 2015 by using Hubble. By that time, the Supernova's light would have likely dimmed, and they'd be able to see the zombie star much easier.
