Things that go Boom!

It is believed, that stars at the end of their lives have only 3 possible outcomes.   They either become a white dwarf for low mass stars, a neutron star for more massive stars and for even more massive stars then a new stellar blackhole is born.

Which bring us to the topic of today's blog, which sheds light to the question: What is a Type Ia Supernova?    Type Ia Supernova explains what happens when a white dwarf (the remnant of a low mass star) has a companion star that 'dumps' material onto the white dwarf.    You might find surprising, that a star dumps material onto a star remnant in a binary system.  The easier way to explain this phenomenon, is to think of what happens when we try to put things into space.    If you want to have something in space that stays in orbit between the Sun and the Earth without the need to use any energy to keep it in orbit, you need to put it at a distance between the Sun and the Earth where their mutual gravitational forces cancel out.    If you can picture this, then it won't be a stretch to understand what happens when a star orbits too close to its white dwarf companion.  Material from the star will be pulled gravitationally by the white dwarf and that material is now on the surface of the white dwarf.

Unfortunately, white dwarfs can handle so much material from its companion and when its mass reaches 1.4 solar masses, it blows itself into smithereens. This explosion is what is called a Type Ia Supernova. Back in 1572, Tycho Barhe, a danish astronomer, studied this very intense new star on the sky.   It happened that he was looking at what we now know as the Tycho Supernova.   Just recently, astronomers have confirmed that the Supernova was due to a companion dumping material onto it.  For more details you can read Sky and Telescope article and for the more ambitious here is the recent paper.