When a white dwarf star that has a nearby companion star begins to feed off
the gas of its companion star, the gas builds up until a nuclear reaction
begins on the white dwarf. Once the nuclear reaction begins, the white dwarf is
suddenly much, much brighter than it was previously and is known as a nova.
Recently, a white dwarf star in our own Milky Way galaxy went nova and
produced enough light that people would have been able to see the light with
the naked eye. Despite the fact that researchers have concluded anyone looking
at the constellation Puppis would have seen the light produced form the nova,
no one reported the event.
The XMM-Newton x-ray telescope happened
across the x-rays produced by the nova while changing targets. Space.com
reports that team of scientists running the XMM-Newton found that the x-ray
source was not listed in the x-ray catalog and narrowed the source of the burst
down to three candidates include the culprit known by catalog number USNO-A2.0
0450-03360039.
The XMM-Newton team alerted other astronomers to their find including the
team operating the Magellan-Clay telescope at the Las Campas Observatory in
Chile. The Chilean team was able to determine that USNO-A2.0 0450-03360039 was
the source of the x-rays and that it was 600 times brighter than normal.
Analysis of the light from the source classified the object as a nova reports Space.com.
The astronomers say x-rays are not released after a star goes nova for days
due to the expanding debris cloud that masks the x-rays early after a nova
occurs. That fact indicated that the nova had occurred days prior to the x-rays
being discovered.
The nova has been named V598 Puppis and is one of the brightest novas to
have occurred for almost a decade. In March 2008 DailyTech reported that
light from a supernova
that happened billions of years ago had finally reached the Earth.