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Scientists said a distant star died, then continued to send out “signs of life” in the form of recurring active flares.
Nothing like this has been seen before, and scientists are still unsure of the mechanisms that would allow this “zombie” star to continue sending out bright, brief flashes of light.
Scientists say the flashes continued over several months, each lasting only a few minutes but remaining as bright as the original star’s explosion even 100 days later, in what is known as the Luminous Fast Blue Optical Transit, or LFBOT, which is located about a billion light-years away. the earth.
Scientists now believe that activity that occurs after death must be an explanation for these intense and mysterious explosions. The team believes that it comes out of the star itself, after it died and left behind a “corpse” in the form of a black hole or neutron star.
“We don’t think anything else could produce these kinds of flares,” said Anna Wai Kew Ho, assistant professor of astronomy in the College of Arts and Sciences. “This resolves years of debate about what fuels these types of explosions, and reveals an unusually direct way to study the activity of stellar bodies.”
Professor Ho wrote the software that first detected the event in September 2022, and extracted it from data taken from a facility in California.
Later, in December, scientists, including Professor Ho, were studying the star and noticed that it appeared to have exploded into an extremely bright spike that quickly faded away.
Professor Ho said: “No one really knew what to say. We’ve never seen anything like this before, something as fast, and as bright as the original explosion months later, in any supernova or fast blue luminous optical transient (FBOT). “We have never seen this before in astronomy.”
The team then tried to better understand the dead star by collaborating with other scientists in a study that ultimately brought together more than 70 co-authors and 15 telescopes. They looked at the data to make sure the brightness wasn’t an error. But they found that the light was coming from the star, and that it pulsated at least 14 times in 120 days, and perhaps much more.
“Surprisingly, instead of fading steadily as expected, the source briefly brightened again, and again, and again,” Professor Ho noted. “Blasts of luminous fast blue optical transients are indeed some kind of exotic event.”
In fact, the star allows scientists to look at it as it transforms into a “corpse,” and thus could provide a way to view a process that is usually only seen at specific times.
Scientists are still trying to figure out the processes that would make the dead star behave this way. They hope that by doing so they will not only understand the mysterious flashes, but they will get a better picture of how stars die and what might happen to them next.
