'Renegade' White Dwarf Survived a Supernova. Now It's Warping the Little Dipper Before Our Eyes.

[Judi Lynn]

By Brandon Specktor, Senior Writer | July 11, 2019 01:15pm ET

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'Renegade' White Dwarf Survived a Supernova. Now It's Warping the Little Dipper Before Our Eyes.
The universe is full of "runaway stars" trying to escape their home galaxy (including the reddish-blue dot in the bottom-right corner of this NASA telescope image). A new study suggests that some of these stellar renegades may in fact be rare supernova survivors.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

There's a rebellious, half-dead star in the Little Dipper that's hellbent on escaping our galaxy — and now, astronomers have an idea why.

The star, a small white dwarf that's moving incredibly fast toward the edge of the galaxy, may be one of just a handful of known white dwarfs that exploded in supernovas and lived to tell the tale, according to a study published June 21 in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Academic Astronomical Society.

The study authors said this unusual star, named LP 40−365, is a "partly burnt runaway remnant," suggesting that a peculiar, weaker-than-average supernova rendered the star much smaller, faster and toastier than a typical white dwarf. Strange as it appears, this stellar oddity may not be alone; using data from the European Space Agency's Gaia space telescope, the study authors also found three additional stars in other parts of the galaxy with properties and trajectories similar to LP 40-365's.

The researchers said these four oddball stars may represent a newfound type of fate for white dwarfs that run out of fuel and explode — a fate that leaves them charred, shrunken and streaking across the galaxy at incredible velocities, but still largely intact. These partly burnt dwarfs "form a distinct class of chemically peculiar runaway stars," the study authors wrote, and the objects could shed their own weird form of light on the complex factors that cause stars to explode in the first place.

More:
https://www.livescience.com/65914-partly-burnt-remnants-survive-supernova.html?utm_source=notification

[Karadeniz]

1. Is this where chaos theory comes in?