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Does galaxy hold thousands of ticking 'time
bombs'?
Wednesday September 07, 2011 04:53:49 PM,
IANS
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Washington: In the
blockbuster 'Speed', a bomb on a bus is triggered to detonate if
the vehicle slows down below 50 miles an hour.
The premise, slow down and you explode, while making for a great
action flick, also happens to have its cosmic equivalent.
New research shows that some old stars might be held up by their
rapid spins. When they slow down, they explode as supernovae.
Thousands of these "time bombs" may be scattered throughout our
galaxy.
"We haven't found one of these 'time bomb' stars yet in the Milky
Way, but this research suggests we've been looking for the wrong
signs," says Rosanne Di Stefano of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre
for Astrophysics.
The specific type of stellar explosion Di Stefano and her
colleagues studied is called a Type Ia supernova.
It occurs when an old, compact star known as a white dwarf
destabilizes, according to a Harvard-Smithsonian Centre statement.
A white dwarf is a stellar remnant that has ceased nuclear fusion.
It typically can weigh up to 1.4 times as much as our Sun -- a
figure called the Chandrasekhar mass after the astronomer who
first calculated it.
"Any heavier, and gravity overwhelms the forces supporting the
white dwarf, compacting it and igniting runaway nuclear fusion
that blows the star apart.
"We don't know of any super-Chandrasekhar-mass white dwarfs in the
Milky Way yet, but we're looking forward to hunting them out,"
said co-author Rasmus Voss of Radboud University Nijmegen, The
Netherlands.
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