Scientists discovered a new kind of astronomical phenomenon. 🧐
The white dwarf uses its strong magnetic fields to funnel the hydrogen towards its poles, triggering a micronova explosion that's contained by the magnetic fields at one of the white dwarf’s poles.
After months of puzzling over the source of the sudden thermonuclear explosion, they realized the phenomenon — they call it a “micronova” — was new to science. In most other stellar explosions involving white dwarfs, the star is completely surrounded in a"shell" of hydrogen that burns brightly for weeks or months. The researchers think a micronova occurs when the white dwarf’s strong magnetic field corrals the hydrogen near its poles.
“Because these two objects are so close to each other, the white dwarf actually pulls material from the companion. It literally steals part of the atmosphere of the companion star, pulls it, and accretes it onto its surface,” Scaringi says.The white dwarf fused the hydrogen into heavier elements in a huge and fast thermonuclear explosion. The researchers think the amount of hydrogen fueling the explosion was roughly 3.5 billion times the mass of Great Pyramids of Giza.
“TESS stares at the same object for at least one month and sometimes up to a year, so we get these incredibly long and precise brightness variations most of the time,” he says. “It's only because we had so much data on one object that we were able to see this 10-hour flare. Otherwise, it would have been lost.”
“We started writing a draft [that] was basically showing the discovery and listing out all the [explanations for the data] we thought about and how none of them would really work,” he says.“Then, finally, we found another two objects that showed remarkably similar profiles,” he says. Adding extra cases to the pile of evidence made all the difference."These other objects were also suspected to be magnetic white dwarfs.
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