Explosions in the Sky, but we must wait a while

UK astronomers have predicted an explosion in space that will be trillions of times more powerful than the nuclear bomb.

The explosion is not due for another 23 billion years, however, and despite being so close to our solar system, this supernova will not endanger our planet.

Publishing their findings in Nature Astronomy on Friday, the team from University of Warwick claim to have discovered an extremely rare, high mass, compact binary star system only ~150 light years away.

The astronomers say the two stars are on a collision course to explode as a type 1a supernova, appearing 10 times brighter than the moon in the night sky.

For the supernova event, mass will transfer from one dwarf to the other, resulting in in a rare and complex supernova explosion through a quadruple detonation that will materialise in just four seconds.

The explosions will completely destroy the entire system, with energy levels a thousand trillion trillion times that of the most powerful nuclear bomb.

Billions of years into the future, this supernova will appear as a very intense point of light in the night sky. It will make some of the brightest objects look faint in comparison.

The University of Warwick team says the Type 1a supernovae are a special class of cosmic explosion, famously used as ‘standard candles’ to measure distances between Earth and their host galaxies.

They occur when a white dwarf (the dense remnant core of a star) accumulates too much mass, is unable to withstand its own gravity, and explodes.

Dr. Ingrid Pelisoli, Assistant Professor at The University of Warwick and third author, commented, “This is very significant discovery. Finding such a system on our galactic doorstep is an indication that they must be relatively common, otherwise we would have needed to look much further away, searching a larger volume of our galaxy, to encounter them.”