The Star That Exploded Without Hydrogen

The bipolar shell of V445 Puppis, imaged from the Very Large Telescope over two years. The pinched waist at the centre is the dust disc that hid the system for a quarter of a century (Credit : ESO/P.A. Woudt)

Twenty five years ago a star in the constellation Puppis blew itself apart and then vanished behind a curtain of its own soot. Astronomers knew only that the explosion contained no hydrogen at all, which for the most abundant element in the universe is a very strange absence. Now the dust has finally thinned, and the culprits have stepped into view, a white dwarf quietly stripping a rare helium star of its substance. But the emerging picture came with something nobody expected, clumps of gas tearing outwards at twenty million miles an hour, of a kind never seen in any other nova. Nobody yet knows what fired them.

Universe Today
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