The Star That Refused to Die
The death of a big star, much more massive than our sun, usually proceeds like this: After millions and millions of years of shiny existence, the star starts to run out of hydrogen. Without this fuel, the star can’t power the nuclear fusion that produces its light. Its core shrinks and heats up, spawning heavier and heavier elements until mostly iron remains. Within a second, the core collapses and sends star material flying in a spectacular light show—a supernova—that fades after several months. The dead star leaves behind a neutron star, a very dense object, or a black hole, the light-gobbling lurkers of the universe.
What a star isn’t supposed to do, however, is stay alive.
A team of international Wednesday the discovery of a supernova that occurred in 2014 and continued to erupt for more than 600 days, making it the longest such explosion ever observed. The light of typical supernovae usually lasts only 100 days, and anything more than 130 days is extremely rare. When astronomers dug into archival data, they found evidence of another supernova in the same location in an image from 1954. The star responsible for both explosions, the researchers say, somehow managed to survive a blast and explode again 60 years later.
