The Briefing Room
General Category => Science, Technology and Knowledge => Space => Topic started by: Suppressed on August 30, 2017, 11:17:15 pm
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Mystery of Cosmic Explosion Recorded 600 Years Ago Finally Solved by Scientists
Hannah Osborne
Newsweek August 30, 2017
https://www.yahoo.com/news/mystery-cosmic-explosion-recorded-600-170002517.html
On March 11, 1437 AD, Korean royal astrologers saw what they thought was a new star appearing in the night sky. They recorded its position as being in the tail of the constellation of Scorpius, about one degree from the star Zeta Sco or Eta Sco. The brightening was observed for 14 days before fading away.
Now, almost 600 years later, a team of astrophysicists has worked out what was responsible for this cosmic explosion.
From the original description, the team knew they were looking for a nova eruption—an extremely powerful explosion, where a white dwarf is fed by hydrogen from a nearby star. After around 100,000 years, it has built up so much hydrogen it produces a massive burst, making the star about 300,000 times brighter than our sun for a short period of time.
Which star system was responsible for the 1437 nova eruption was a mystery, however. In a study published in the journal Nature (http://nature.com/articles/doi:10.1038/nature23644), researchers led by Michael Shara, from the American Museum of Natural History, New York, started looking back at thousands of years’ worth of historical records of binary systems that could have been responsible.
In these records, they were searching for a bright object with a shell of hydrogen surrounding it. By analyzing various plates taken with different telescopes over the past 100 years, along with records from ancient China, Korea and Japan, they were able to narrow down the candidate stars to just one.
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Excerpt. Read more for the answer at https://www.yahoo.com/news/mystery-cosmic-explosion-recorded-600-170002517.html
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Neat! I wish I could have seen it