This Star Might Be as Old as The TV From Our Home

Stars are born every day in the Universe, but finding a relatively young one is like finding the needle in a haystack. Scientists estimate that 400 million stars are born every single day in the entire Universe. This shouldn’t surprise us at all, considering that there are trillions of galaxies out there, each of them having billions of stars.

A lot of those people reading this article were born in the ’90s, and they might have the same birthday as the supposed neutron star that scientists believe is emerging in the SN 1987A galaxy.

Born from a supernova?

The hypothetical neutron star could have been born after a supernova. This is the classical way neutron stars are born, as they’re the core remnants of a former star that exploded. At first, astronomers were skeptical about the stars’ chance to survive the blast and not become a black hole, but a further study relies on the prevailing of the extremely dense cosmic object. If this outcome will be confirmed, the neutron star from the SN 1987A galaxy will be the youngest ever discovered: only 33 years old.

For the new hypothesis, astronomers are relying on high-resolution imagery gathered by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile. They located a hot blob inside the supernova’s core, and it’s too small for the scientists to be able to tell for sure what it is.

Mikako Matsuura from Cardiff University declared:

We were very surprised to see this warm blob made by a thick cloud of dust in the supernova remnant,

The scientist also added:

There has to be something in the cloud that has heated up the dust and which makes it shine. That’s why we suggested that there is a neutron star hiding inside the dust cloud,

The new study paper was published in The Astrophysical Journal.

You May Also Like

About the Author: Webby Feed

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.