![]() ![]() But ZTF SLRN-2020 turned out to have much cooler gas and dust clouds surrounding the star, so De and colleagues started to search for different explanations. When a white dwarf goes nova, it gets surrounded by flows of hot gas producing a bright flash of light which can be detected by optical telescopes. ZTF looks for cosmic events with brightness levels that change rapidly, sometimes in a matter of hours. ![]() Kishalay De, an astronomer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the lead author of a new study published in Nature, was searching for this kind of event by looking at observations made with the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), an instrument based at Palomar Observatory in Southern California. We know the physics behind this kind of event, and now astronomers think they have observed it in real time too.Īt first sight, the event formally known as ZTF SLRN-2020 looked like a collapsed star (white dwarf) stripping out hot gas from a neighbor star. If a planet is orbiting too close, it gets inevitably swallowed up by the swollen star. ![]() What just happened? When a mid-size star is about to complete its main life cycle, it runs out of the "fuel" needed to feed the nuclear fusion process at its core and starts expanding outward. ![]()
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