#type 1a

Tycho's Supernova Remnant in X-ray

When a star goes supernova, it creates a shock wave which radiates outwards, gathering dust and gas as it does, creating a bubble like structure that can become dense enough to form new stars itself.

RS Ophiuchi

Some stars just misbehave ! That's true enough for the human kind, but also the stellar ones. RS Ophiuchi is one of those, usually invisible to all but some of the best telescopes, but every so often flares up to become visible to the naked eye, in fact it has done exactly this during 1898, 1933, 1958, 1967, 1985, 2006 and 2021.

The star is currently visible, although probably not so easy in light polluted areas in the constellation of Ophiuchus.

So what is happening to this star ? It turns out, it's not a single star, and that's the issue.

RS Oph is a red giant, but it has a very close neighbour, it turns out, far too close for comfort, a small dense white dwarf, the remnants of a once binary partnership that has now gone rogue.

White dwarfs may be small, from the size of the Earth down to in the most dense cases, the size of the moon, yet, they retain some of the mass of the original star, often .5 to 1.4 solar masses. The higher the mass, the smaller the remnant is too, so you can imagine an object the size of the moon with the gravity of 1.5 of our Sun coming too close to a bloated old red dwarf, the rest is chaos.

Kepler’s Supernova SN1604

On October 8-9th 1604 a new star appeared in the night sky, and after three weeks, it vanished again.

The event was noted by Johannes Kepler, a German astronomer of the time, and was eventually named after him, although it wasn’t for a few centuries more that it would be revealed exactly what it was.

Supernova in our galaxy are quite rare, so much so, with the exception of SN1987a (which was in the Large magellanic clouds which circle our galaxy), Kepler's supernova was the last one observed.

Scientists have recently been able to measure the speed of the clumps of gas flying away from the explosion, caused when a white dwarf accreted so much mass from a orbiting neighbour, it blew itself and the neighbour apart in a spectacular supernova, known as a type 1a explosion (type 2 are caused when a supermassive star collapses at the end of it’s helium burning phase).

They found that the cloud is moving faster than 20 million miles per hour !

Keplers Supernova (SN 1604)

One night in October 1604, a bright new star appeared in the Constellation of Ophiuchus, it became so bright it was visible even during the day, it lasted for a few weeks, then slowly began to dim, visible for a few more months until fading away.

This was a Supernova, 20,000 light years from Earth in our Milky Way, and witnessed by Johannes Kepler, to whom it is now known after. It was also witnessed by Galileo and a variety of other eminent scientists of the era, and seen as evidence and proof that the heavens were not fixed in place. 

Over 400 years later, and that supernova explosion has produced the nebula. This supernova was a type 1a, theorised to be a red giant star with a now dead white dwarf companion. The white dwarf began to pull material from the red giant which eventually collapsed into a neutron star in an explosion that lit up most of the Milky Way galaxy.

Artist: The Browning

Title: Type 1a

Album: Hypernova

Genre: Deathcore, Trancecore, Metalcore, EDM

Label: Earache Records

Year: 2013 Lyrics:

This will not be the end This will not be the end The time has come for me to prove my worth My selflessness will be the light that shines

At the end of time a moment will come when just one man remains Standing alone will he find the strength To carry on after all he loves is dead and gone? Everything is dead and gone

This will not be the end This will not be the end The time has come to prove my worth Your selfishness will run its course

What are you asking?

What are you asking? Should we weigh the life of one man to the future of all mankind? What are you asking? What are you asking? How could you be so selfish?