With a pair of Magic telescopes, astronomers have spotted a binary star system 5,000 light-years from Earth that explodes in an exciting new supernova every 15 years.
The binary star (RS Ophiuchi RS Oph) is located in the constellation Ophiuchus and consists of a white dwarf and a red giant on the cusp of supernova burning.
Astronomers from the Max Planck Institute in Germany studied the pair using the Magic Telescope, a system of two Cherenkov atmospheric imaging telescopes at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory in La Palma, Canary Islands.
An exciting explosion of the binary pair occurs every 15 years, as the red giant sheds its material and falls to the surface of the white dwarf, a dead star.
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The birthplaces of supernovae are systems in which two completely different stars live in a parasitic relationship, usually a smaller star and a larger one.
In this case, there’s a white dwarf, a small, scorching, dense star where a teaspoon of matter weighs a ton, orbiting a red giant, an old star that will soon burn up.
The dying giant star feeds the white dwarf with a substance that drops the outer hydrogen layer, while gas flows into the nearby white dwarf, and this flow of matter continues, until the white dwarf feeds on itself and explodes.
The temperature and pressure in the newly acquired stellar shells then become too high, and they are flung away in a gigantic thermonuclear explosion, while the dwarf star remains intact, and the cycle begins again – until the scene repeats itself.
Such outbursts have been speculated to have high energies, but the exact details were not clear – especially for this particular supernova.
The two Magic Telescopes recorded gamma rays with a value of 250 gigaelectronvolts (GeV), which are among the highest energies ever measured in a nova. By comparison, the radiation’s energy is a hundred billion times greater than that of visible light.