Idiot Star Won't Die: It's Up To Us To Kill It

(CNN)It's the star that won't die, even though it has exploded and appeared to go down in a blaze of glory multiple times. This superlong supernova may be the first of its kind.

When they first observed supernova iPTF14hls in September 2014, astronomers at Las Cumbres Observatory in California thought it was perfectly normal. They analyzed the light of the explosion to study the material ejected and its speed.

But Zheng Chuen Wong, an intern at the observatory from the University of California, Santa Barbara, noticed something strange about the supernova and showed it to Iair Arcavi, a NASA Einstein postdoctoral fellow at the university.

 

 A supernova, the massive explosion of a star, usually signals the end. Typically, a supernova remains bright for 100 days before fading. But this one fluctuated by brightening and dimming over the course of 600 days, according to a study released in the journal Nature on Wednesday.

Full article here.

Well at first, I thought this was just a classic case of an idiot star that wouldn’t stay down. Just another friend who keeps slamming shots even though he’s already booted three times, who keeps challenging you to a rematch in 2K even though he hasn’t won since 2015, or who keeps texting that one ex-girlfriend even though she’s engaged.

This, in my eyes, was a tale as old as time. The story of a man, or in this case star, who didn’t know they had lost. I kept thinking to myself, “The next time will be the last,” and envisioned how all of his little star buddies would pat him on the head at the end of his next over-dramatic supernova. “Stay down, Trevor” they’d tell him, “it’s over man, let’s go to McDonalds”. Except there would be no McDonalds for Trevor, not this night, nor any other night for that matter. Because as soon as Trevor was done spewing his star-dust guts all over the galaxy, he’d fade into the dark, gentle night in his little dried up star-husk or whatever happens (I unapologetically know nothing about space), and that would have been the end of Trevor. His friends would have remembered him fondly for a bit, but eventually that, and they, would fade too. That’s what should have happened. That’s, based off of my opinion that I’ve formed off of reading one space article, what has happened every other time. Apparently, this is zombie star is more powerful than (royal) we expected. Turns out this star has been exploding over and over again and showing no sign of death.

Now this is a different case. This isn’t Trevor the star who won’t stay down. This is Ron, the star who just keeps getting stronger. Every time Ron vomits, it’s like he opens up his stomach to consume more than he just expelled. Every time Ron gets punched in the face, it’s as if his rage grows to compensate for his shattered cheekbones. There’s no stopping Ron, and there’s really no hope in containing him either. When it comes to tireless Ron the zombie star, your only hope, and dare I say it humanity’s only hope, is that someday his body won’t be able to cash the check that his actions have written.

Again, I don’t know anything about space, and I won’t apologize for it. But I do know that every time I see something happen in the galaxy that can’t be explained, I assume that it spells destruction for all of mankind. So I don’t know what we have to do: whether it’s shoot a bunch of missiles at this star to put it down for good, or train a bunch of coal miners to become astronauts and jump inside it to put it out of its misery. I don’t know the next steps, but NASA, I do know it’s time to get started.