This lightning star brings hell out of the Milky Way

Crossing the Milky Way at nearly 2 million miles per hour, the LP 40-365 star shows no sign of stopping. A team of astronomers recently discovered that the star was propelled into its current speedrun by a supernova explosion millions of years ago.

LP 40-365 is unusual. It is a white dwarf, a small, compact star at the end of its life, and it is very rich in metals. LP 40-365 also has its own atmosphere, which is mainly composed of oxygen and neon. But most important in this story is that the star fled from a huge star explosion, which triggered its momentum. out of the galaxy.

When a white dwarf orbit another (in what is called a white dwarf binary), one star gives way to the other, who swallows it up regularly. Binaries can also emit gravitational waves– disturbances in space-time – as they revolve around each other, with the starving star (the accelerator) as a duo detonating in a huge thermonuclear explosion.

The team behind the new research is not I’m sure stars like LP 40-365 are usually the donors or the accretors in their white dwarf binary systems, but they think this particular hot metal ball is basically a shard of star shell from the accretive star, which eventually exploded in a fantastic way. Their the conclusions were published this week in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

“To have suffered a partial detonation and survive is very cool and unique, and it was only in the last few years that we started to think that this kind of star could exist. Odelia Putterman, now a researcher at Occidental College and co-author of the article, told The Brink, a publicayouover from Boston University.

The team found the star using observations from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey (TESS) satellite and the Hubble Space Telescope, which revealed a fast-moving object with a regular pattern of gradation and brightening. This suggested that the star was spinning slowly – completing its rotation every nine hours – as it traversed space. This is a fairly slow rate of rotation, and strange to think of in conjunction with the speed at which the star is moving through space. This is of this rate of rotation that the team believes the white dwarf is the remnant of a star in a binary system collapsing on itself, blasting its partner and everything else in the area outward at extraordinary speed . Based on the team’s calculations, they believe that LP 40-365 has been traveling from its home galaxy for just over 5 million years ago.

“The star is actually dropped by the explosion, and we are [observing] its rotation when it comes out, ”Putterman told The Brink .

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