The observation confirms a 30-year-old hypothesis.
Astronomers are swimming in data, but they still rely on something stargazers have always needed: a little bit of luck.happened to be making its 23rd scan of a patch of sky in the constellation Reticulum when X-rays from a brief thermonuclear explosion rolled past the instrument.
"So, imagine a flurry of excited emails...," Wilms says. The researchers eventually realized they'd detected never-before-seen X-rays from a nova explosion. The observation confirms a 30-year-old hypothesis As it turns out, the researchers hadn't just observed something cool. They'd collected data to confirm a three-decade-old hypothesis that speculated what would happen when dead star turned itself into a hydrogen bomb in one last blaze of glory.
When a small star burns through all its fuel it shrinks into what's called a white dwarf. Imagine the mass of the Sun compressed into a dense ball no bigger than Earth. When a white dwarf and another star orbit each other the white dwarf's tremendous gravity can pull matter from the star and trigger a
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