Nasa finally finds 'robber' star
11 Sept
The things that go down in space are awesome - in the true meaning of the word. And anybody who says otherwise doesn't know what they're talking about.
Take, for instance, this recent discovery by Nasa. It involves a rare type of supernova (basically an exploding star), which has been named SN 1993J.
Astronomers reckon a supernova occurs every second somewhere in the universe - which is amazing in itself. But this supernova is all the more incredible because it was caused by two stars interacting to cause a cosmic explosion.
SN 1993J is part of what's called a "binary system" - basically two stars orbiting around a central point.
Nasa was able to see the magnificent exploding supernova, but couldn't locate its smaller "companion star'. It believes this smaller star interacted with SN 1993J, stealing a load of the bigger star's hydrogen as it exploded.
After 21 years of searching, the Hubble Telescope has finally located the culprit. The team knew the companion star would be emitting great quantities of UV light, but they couldn't see it because the exploding supernova was just too bright.
However, they recently managed to combine optical light data and Hubble's UV light images to construct a spectrum that matched the predicted glow of a companion star (also known as the "continuum emission").
"This is like a crime scene, and we finally identified the robber," said Alex Filippenko, professor of astronomy at University of California (UC) at Berkeley. "The companion star stole a bunch of hydrogen before the primary star exploded."
