A“vampire star”,which feeds on others to increase its brightness, has been analyzed by astronomers with the help of the VLT telescope of the European Southern Observatory (ESO).
Object V445, located in the constellation Puppis, 25,000 light years from the Sun, has been absorbing gas from a neighboring star, increasing the intensity of the light it emits about 250 times. As the researchers explain, this star is the best known candidate to explode astype Ia supernova.
“One of the main problems in modern astrophysics is the fact that we still do not know exactly what types of star systems explode as type Ia supernovae,” explained Patrick Woudt, a researcher at the University of Cape Town and co-author of the study. “This is quite embarrassing, as these supernovae play a crucial role in showing that the expansion of the Universe is currently accelerating, driven by a mysteriousdark energy“.
Thesupernova it is one of the possible ways in which a star can end its life, exploding in spectacular fashion. One of the defining characteristics of supernovae Ia is the lack ofhydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe. And V445 Puppis is the first – and so far the only – nova that shows no evidence of hydrogen. It is common for these explosions to originate in systems composed of two stars, one of which becomes a white dwarf. When that white dwarf acts as a vampire and absorbs matter from her partner, at a certain limit she becomes unstable and explodes.
