A zombie star’s spiky filaments shed light on a 12th century supernova

Some 6,five hundred light-years from Earth lurks a zombie famous person cloaked in long tendrils of hot sulfur.

No person knows how those tendrils formed. But astronomers now know where they’re going. New observations, reported within the Nov. 1 Astrophysical Journal Letters, capture the three-D structure and motion of debris left within the wake of a supernova that was once seen to detonate almost 900 years ago.

“It’s a chunk of the puzzle towards figuring out this very bizarre [supernova] remnant,” says astronomer Tim Cunningham of the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.

The supernova was once first recorded in 1181 as a “guest famous person” by astronomers in ancient China and Japan (SN: Four/17/02). Astronomers didn’t to locate the remains to be of that explosion, now is often called the Pa 30 nebula, until 2013.

And after they did to locate the remnant, it looked weird. The supernova gave the impression to be a kind is often called type 1a, wherein a white dwarf famous person detonates, destroying itself within the strategy (SN: three/23/Sixteen). But throughout this case, a portion of the famous person survived.

Stranger still, the famous person was once surrounded by spiky filaments stretching about three light-years in all directions. “It's really unique,” Cunningham says. “There’s no other supernova nebula that shows filaments like this.”

He and colleagues used a telescope on the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii to record how fast the filaments are moving relative to Earth. Then they built a three-D reconstruction of the filaments and their motions through space.

The team found that the system is structured “just like a three-layered onion,” Cunningham says. The inner layer is the famous person. Then there’s a gap of one or two light-years, which ends in a spherical shell of dust. The final layer is the filaments, which emerge from the dust shell.

Researchers still aren’t sure how the filaments formed, or how they’ve maintained their straight-line shapes for centuries. One possibility is that a shock wave from the explosion ricocheted off the diffuse subject material between stars and bounced back toward the white dwarf. That wave may need sculpted the subject material into the spikes astronomers see. Future theoretical studies using the new observations may perchance help solve the puzzle.

The study did show that this remnant is likely from the guest famous person of 1181. Taking the speeds and positions of the filaments and tracing them backward show all of them emanated from the same point across the year 1152, give or take seventy five years.