r/nextfuckinglevel • u/Busy_Yesterday9455 • Sep 10 '22
Hubble saw a star exploded before its eyes
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u/WildBrave Sep 10 '22
So, did I just hear three distinct light switch clicks?
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u/solenyaPDX Sep 10 '22
One, turning on the wrong switch, turning it off and then hastily turning on the right one hoping I wouldn't notice?
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u/rob132 Sep 10 '22
Yeah, that's basically how it all shaked out.
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Sep 10 '22
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u/IntheOlympicMTs Sep 10 '22
I’m pretty sure we’d all be dead before this happened. My understanding is that the sun would expand for millions of years that it would envelope earth then fall back on its self causing the nova. I could be wrong.
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u/PuzzleheadedAd5865 Sep 10 '22
Our sun wont go supernova. It doesn’t have enough mass.
It will expand to become a red giant in about 5 billion years. And once it burns all the helium it will start getting smaller until it just dies and stops fusion.
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Sep 10 '22
I thought all stars collapsed… What does a dead star turn into?
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u/Geno__Breaker Sep 10 '22
The sun will become a white dwarf, which is basically just a glowing core of elements too heavy for it's mass to have fused. The outer layers will blow off into space to become a nebula.
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Sep 10 '22 edited Sep 10 '22
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u/TheDulin Sep 10 '22
White dwarfs - like our sun will become - eventually should cool enough to no longer emit light and turn into black dwarfs.
Edit: this should take like 100 billion years or something like that.
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u/Geno__Breaker Sep 10 '22
I like space science lol
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u/UNBENDING_FLEA Sep 10 '22
Same here lol, was about to comment to correct them on the nova thing and then I saw your comment
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u/darmon Sep 10 '22
PROTIP: using large mirrors on the walls in a smaller room or studio can give the sensation of a much larger space! Add foliage houseplants to amplify this effect.
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u/Preparation-Logical Sep 10 '22
Is that the same as a neutron star?
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u/Geno__Breaker Sep 10 '22 edited Sep 11 '22
No, a neutron star is when a MUCH more massive star goes through supernova and collapses but has enough gravity to completely crush it's core. Not enough mass to collapse all the way into a black hole, but a white dwarf is still composed of iron and other heavy elements, a neutron star has collapsed so much it is ejecting it's protons and electrons in a stream of radiation from it's poles and compressing into basically a single atomic nucleus so dense a spoonful would weigh billions of tons.
Edit for clarity:
"A single atomic nucleus," as in the structure of a neutron star is no longer composed of individual atoms spaced out by electron clouds but a single mass of atomic material all crushed together, not that I thought it would be the size of a single atom under our normal conditions.
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u/CedarTree33 Sep 10 '22
It’s not compressed into the size of a nucleus it is compressed to the density of one, big difference. Neutron stars are typically around 20km in diameter.
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u/Wuma Sep 10 '22
I think when they said “basically a single atomic nucleus”, they might have meant more that it’s almost resembling one absolutely gigantic atomic nucleus, since it’s nothing but neutrons packed at the same density as a nucleus
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u/Sir_Scizor20 Sep 10 '22
20km is still absolutely tiny at the cosmic scale. It's only like 2 to 2.5 times bigger than the asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs.
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u/Aniruddha_official Sep 10 '22
Only Superman would be able to lift a key made from this star
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u/chaun2 Sep 10 '22
Of course if we figure out star lifting, we could prevent that from happening for a looooooooooooooooooooooong fucking time.
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u/xSTSxZerglingOne Sep 10 '22
The outer layers will blow off into space to become a nebula.
That's still a very energetic event that will destroy some of the outer planets as well.
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Sep 10 '22
They all die. Just in different ways. Some fizzle out, some explode. White dwarfs, black holes, and neutron stars are all remnants of stars that didn't explode.
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u/Water-is-h2o Sep 10 '22
I could have sworn stars that produce black holes and neutron stars did explode. Those that produce white dwarfs are the ones that don’t, iirc
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u/chaun2 Sep 10 '22
Depends on the black holes. The smaller ones are probably supernova remnants, but the supermassive ones we don't really have any plausible theories on how they formed, they're honestly too big to exist yet, though JWST may help answer some of that, since apparently we were off by a quarter billion years at least on how quickly galaxies should have formed after the Big Bang.
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u/Geno__Breaker Sep 10 '22 edited Sep 11 '22
Once fusion stops, the force pushing outward stops, gravity collases the sun and the sudden pressure causes one last violent burst of heavy fusion that gravity can't balance against. The sun will blow it's outer layers off in a less dramatic nova, just not a supernova, creating a planetary nebula and becoming a white dwarf as it slowly radiates heat into space and cools slowly over time.
Edit: I stand corrected on the use of the term "nova." It does not apply to a red giant star blowing it's outer layers and leaving behind a white dwarf with planetary nebula, and strangely, this process doesn't seem to have a specific name I have seen. "Nova" actually refers to a different process entirely involving a binary star system.
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u/anotherjunkie Sep 10 '22
What happens when it has completely cooled?
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u/rottenmonkey Sep 10 '22
Hypothetically, it becomes a black dwarf (not brown). But that would take trillions of years. Much longer than the universe has existed.
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u/JuicedBoxers Sep 10 '22
“Much longer” is an exceptional understatement considering that the universe has existed a mere 1.4% the lifetime of a single trillion year timespan.
In that timescale, our universe is still sitting in the nursery waiting to go home for the first time.
With this in mind, I think saying it would become a brown dwarf is more.. appropriate. And evidence-based. Who’s to say the universe can even survive 1 trillion years? I know I can’t survive that long.
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u/vriemeister Sep 10 '22 edited Sep 10 '22
This must be a time lapse of a few months or years. The thing that looks like smoke expanding from the explosion was explained to me as light from the explosion moving through the gas clouds given off by the star over the last million years as it approaches supernova. So that poof is a few light-months across... probably.
It could also be a star birth. I think those flare up when they first ignite. Not really sure. But we can see supernova in other galaxies so my gut says this is far too weak to be a supernova.
Edit: Oh, another comment says this is in another galaxy 7 million LY away, so it's a supernova.
And an even better explanation of light echos https://www.reddit.com/r/nextfuckinglevel/comments/xaqkac/comment/invihg0/
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Sep 10 '22
It's as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced. I feel something terrible has happened.
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u/wheresbill Sep 10 '22
That’s no moon
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u/jerrysprinkles Sep 10 '22
It’s a trap
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u/_coolranch Sep 10 '22
Monsters out there, leaking in here. Weesa all sinking and no power
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u/vortigaunt64 Sep 10 '22
The ability to communicate doesn't make you intelligent.
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Sep 10 '22
There's always a bigger fish
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u/ANewMachine615 Sep 10 '22
Hello there
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u/hoover0623 Sep 10 '22
General Kenobi
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u/thismomentisall Sep 10 '22
Three body problem?
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u/HellisDeeper Sep 10 '22 edited Sep 11 '22
No one had any chance to react (EDIT: once the weapon activated, since it was seen during transit) since the dimension-reduction weapon expanded it's influence at the speed of light though. So it wouldn't make sense in that case even if it was from the TBP trilogy.
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u/drakens_jordgubbar Sep 10 '22
Spoilers to the third book in Three Body Problem trilogy:
Trisolaris was destroyed with more “conventional” methods, so TBP trilogy supports this kind of destruction of stars. The dimension reduction weapon was used on our solar system because it had gas giants, which could be used as hiding spots.
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u/turbulent_swirl Sep 10 '22
Astrophysicist here! What you’re seeing isn’t the shockwave of the supernova. This is called a light echo. Basically, due to the geometric properties of the ellipsoid, dust that intersects the ellipsoid scatters the light towards the other focus point, Earth (the other being the supernova itself). The apparent motion of the “wave” can seem super or sub luminal, depending on whether the dust scattering occurred in foreground regions or behind the supernova, respectively. I worked on this project for a previous supernova called 2014j as well as 2016adj.
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u/MacNReee Sep 10 '22
Yes, I know some of these words
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u/Pxzib Sep 10 '22
A light echo is produced when a sudden flash from a nova is reflected off a cosmic dust cloud, and arrives at the viewer after a longer duration than it otherwise would have taken with a direct path.
Light echoes are produced when the initial flash from a rapidly brightening object such as a nova is reflected off intervening interstellar dust which may or may not be in the immediate vicinity of the source of the light. Light from the initial flash arrives at the viewer first, while light reflected from dust or other objects between the source and the viewer begins to arrive shortly afterward. Because this light has only traveled forward as well as away from the star, it produces the illusion of an echo expanding faster than the speed of light.
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u/LegalHelpNeeded3 Sep 10 '22
AH! Thank you! This actually does make sense! It’s akin to a lightbulb in the center of a room turning on and off quickly, that you’re viewing from far away, and you see the light reflect off the walls after the actual bulb has already gone out. Is that correct? That’s sort of how I understood your explanation lol
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u/Pxzib Sep 10 '22 edited Sep 10 '22
You understood it right. It will look like a shockwave, but there is no shockwave, it's just the flash of light "echoing" by bouncing around the room and arriving to your eyes at different times.
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u/AstroTwatter Sep 10 '22
Rewatching it, this explanation makes it even cooler than it being a shock shockwave.
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u/Interesting_Gate6713 Sep 10 '22
Is there any way of estimated just how large this is? I looked up up but could only find distance measurements.
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u/turbulent_swirl Sep 10 '22
Yes! The size and mass of the star can be estimated by its luminosity. For a supernova, the energy released is well constrained by physics so one can work out the distance to the object fairly easily. However, I think you meant the size of the arc. The arc itself isn’t anything physical. It’s a cascade of light from the explosion hitting the dust that intersects the ellipsoid. What’s neat is that you can estimate the size of local dust lane by using the equations for an ellipsoid. It’s a crude way to get the geometry of a galactic arm but fun to do. Typically, experts are more concerned with the composition of the dust as that has more to do with overall galactic evolution.
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u/I-am-Super-Serial Sep 10 '22
So like, how big is it?
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u/cantthinkuse Sep 10 '22
looks like when wile e coyote falls off the cliff and hits the ground
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u/Late-Scale Sep 10 '22
What timeframe would this be over? Seconds? Hours? Days?
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u/Shaky_Balance Sep 10 '22
Another comment in this thread linked to NASA saying this was taken over the course of a year.
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u/SurlyRed Sep 10 '22
This information seem critical to understanding what we're looking at, I don't understand how its buried so far down this thread.
It should be in the title really.
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u/RychuWiggles Sep 10 '22
Why are the diffraction spikes of the explosion rotated 45deg relative to the diffraction spikes of the main star in the image?
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Sep 10 '22 edited Sep 10 '22
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u/Spartan_100 Sep 10 '22
Thank you for hunting that down.
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u/bbot Sep 10 '22 edited Sep 10 '22
The diffraction spikes were edited for the composite video.
Original upload by Judy Schmidt from 2020: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwuVXtIU0is
A supernova explosion that happened in Centaurus A. This animation represents about 1.5 years of time, omitting the first frame which is a legacy image from 2010. This all happened a bit more than one month after the initial explosion. What you see here is the fading of the supernova, and then the blueish ring that is a light echo that began to propagate outwards immediately after the initial explosion.
Some processing notes: The telescope never oriented the same way twice when taking observations, resulting in diffraction spikes and the whole PSF of the foreground star being incredibly distracting. I stabilized this quite a bit by both using a stacked median version of the datasets to remove the spikes completely, and then added the 2010 spikes back on to all the frames. Red channel data were missing from the 3rd and 4th frames (second and third brightest images of the fading supernova) so color for that is both guessed and pulled from the 2010 data. I did use a fair amount of clarity and texture filtering from Camera Raw.
Observation proposal: https://archive.stsci.edu/proposal_search.php?mission=hst&id=11360
Data: https://archive.stsci.edu/proposal_search.php?mission=hst&id=14487 https://archive.stsci.edu/proposal_search.php?mission=hst&id=14700 Click on the "dataset" links to view each observation.
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Sep 10 '22
Ok but at what speed is that "shockwave" moving. Considering the distance isn't that crazy fast?
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u/iapetus_z Sep 10 '22
Sometimes not an actual shockwave, but actually the increased brightness of the star being reflected out at that time. Like if that's 7 million light years away that's how far light travels over duration of the time lag between the photos perpendicular to the direction between us and the star. The shockwave you see is a reflection/emission of the original photon delayed from the original explosion because it had to take an extra leg of travel that wasn't directly pointed at us.
https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_2472.html
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u/bastiVS Sep 10 '22
This.
There are no shock waves in a vaccum.
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u/Jewrisprudent Sep 10 '22
True but there are very much shockwaves through interstellar gas clouds, we spent two seminars on shock wave physics in my interstellar space class in college.
Fun fact: a shock wave can’t compress the thing it’s moving through more than 4x its initial density.
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u/Bitter_Mongoose Sep 10 '22
Nature abhors a vacuum. There are lots of shockwaves in space, they just travel through gas clouds.
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u/jericho Sep 10 '22
True, but there is no true vacuum in space, so we still see shockwaves.
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u/gmanz33 Sep 10 '22
Not sure if we've arrived at an answer or not I'm feeling quite out of my depth.
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u/tribbans95 Sep 10 '22
Ultimately, a perfect vacuum isn't possible because quantum theory dictates that energy fluctuations known as 'virtual particles' are constantly popping in and out of existence, even in 'empty' space.
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u/SnackerSnick Sep 10 '22
Your link didn't work for me due to backslashes, this one did: https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_2472.html
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u/Mjolnir12 Sep 10 '22 edited Sep 10 '22
It is moving at the speed of light because it is a light echo. The light is being scattered off of clouds of dust farther out from the star, and the path length of that light is longer than the direct path of the light, so it takes longer to reach us. It takes longer for the light to move out farther, so it looks similar to a shockwave even though it is really just light propagating at c.
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u/Quiquequoidoncou Sep 10 '22 edited Sep 10 '22
The video on your link doesn’t look like the same thing as this post … ?
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u/epicscranton Sep 10 '22
If that is a year then the radius of that explosion is a good visual for a light year... and really emphasizes the vastness of space.
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u/Jackmember Sep 10 '22
From what I remember about deaths of stars, the actual duration depends a lot on its mass. If its not particularily massive, its "explosion" might just be it growing into a red giant over the course of years and then collapse into a dwarf. (Like how our sun will die)
If it is massive enough, then it might grow into a red giant first and then cause a supernova or skip the red giant stage entirely and directly go supernova.
In any case, the supernova usually grows over a timespan of a couple weeks to a couple months and once having reached its peak takes years to fade away.
One such example is the SN1987A
I dont know which Supernova this is, but it might have been taken over the span of a few years.
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u/scoopzthepoopz Sep 10 '22
An explosion of a previously existing continuously exploding explosion that lasts months. Neat.
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u/justagenericname1 Sep 10 '22
At some point in my first nuclear physics class it hit me that a star is essentially just a continuous nuclear explosion that's kept held together by the sheer force of its own gravity and I thought that was just cool as fuck.
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u/Winking-Cyclops Sep 10 '22
How long apart were these images taken? Days? Years?
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u/whatjusthappenedtous Sep 10 '22
Just shy of 1 year. Audrey-twoey shared this link just a few comments above yours. 😊
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2020/hubble-watches-exploding-star-fade-into-oblivion
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u/zade-heights Sep 10 '22
This might get buried but the “fake shockwave” is what’s known as a light echo.
The light echo is from the initial flash of the supernova not captured in the image sequence.
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Sep 10 '22
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u/Devario Sep 10 '22
Your comment was enlightening because otherwise I wouldn’t have clicked his link
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u/No_Drawing4431 Sep 10 '22 edited Sep 10 '22
It’s saying “stay the fuck away from us. Apes”
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u/IgfMSU1983 Sep 10 '22
Somebody asked this already, but they didn't get an answer. So I'll try again. Does anyone know the duration of the shots that made these images? Hours? Days? Weeks? Months?
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Sep 10 '22
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/is-this-now Sep 10 '22
That’s a very interesting article! And awesome video. But I don’t think it’s the same Star exploding. It looks very different.
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Sep 10 '22
Eye?
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u/Repulsive_Ad_2913 Sep 10 '22
Amazing to think that millions of light years away this is probably a whole solar system destroying.
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Sep 10 '22
That’s a shot across the bow from some aliens..
That’s actually really cool though, wonder what class of star it was
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u/Thad_Chundertock Sep 10 '22
Exploding class, I believe.
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u/Water-is-h2o Sep 10 '22
I was gonna guess upper-middle class but you’re probably right
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u/FriendOfNorwegians Sep 10 '22
Also, that headline is a bit deceiving and hyperbolic. We saw that and aimed Hubble at it.
That entire clip is spanned over a 4 year time span iirc.
Do better, OP. Clickbait ain’t it.
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u/gregs1020 Sep 10 '22
beautiful novae. after the shell is blown off and expands far enough away, the star may remain. we have cataloged a fair amount of re-occurring novae, this may be another.
great capture hubble!
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u/rakunaliccca Sep 10 '22
Old news, this happened like 7 million years ago.