‘Runaway’ stars which survived thermonuclear explosions spotted racing through our galaxy
Three mysterious ‘runaway’ stars have been spotted streaking through our galaxy - and researchers think they may be stars which survived supernova explosions.
Supernova explosions are enormous blasts which signal the death of stars - and which have been spotted by people on Earth for more than 1,000 years.
The stars are all tiny - smaller than normal for a white dwarf, and were spotted hurtling across our Milky Way galaxy using data from the ESA’s Gaia space telescope.
ESA’s Gaia mission has mapped the movements of billions of stars in our galaxy, after it launched in December 2013.
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The mysterious ‘runaway’ stars are thought to be the remnants of supernova explosions - where a tiny fragment of a star survives.
Normally, in a supernova, a thermonuclear explosion leaves either a neutron star or a black hole - but in some cases, a smaller ‘type lax’ explosion is thought to occur.
In these cases, a tiny fragment survives, which is hurled across the universe by the force of the blast.
The researchers suggest that theese stars could be named as a new category of white dwarf, in research published to the pre-print service arXiv.
ESA’s Gaia mission has produced the richest star catalogue to date, including high-precision measurements of nearly 1.7 billion stars.
