\u201cIt goes to show how dynamic the night sky is.\u201d<\/q><\/aside>\n<\/div>\nScaringi and his team stumbled upon this strange phenomenon by chance. They had been working with NASA\u2019s TESS spacecraft, a space-based telescope launched in 2018 that is designed to look for planets outside our Solar System orbiting around stars relatively close to Earth. However, the team wasn\u2019t looking for exoplanets; they were using the telescope to study the variations in brightness of hundreds of stars.<\/p>\n
Scaringi is mostly interested in studying white dwarfs, especially those that have neighboring stars close by. Most stars in the Universe actually come in pairs \u2014 stars that orbit around each other. The binary stars that Scaringi studies consist of a white dwarf orbiting around a star like our Sun. When this configuration occurs, the super dense white dwarf will actually act almost like a vacuum; its huge gravitational pull will start sucking up hydrogen from the nearby star.<\/p>\n
Eventually, the entire surface of the white dwarf will be covered in a layer of hydrogen. And, at some point, the pressure of that layer gets so high that it sparks a thermonuclear explosion. \u201cThe whole layer ignites in a bright flash and burns all of the mass that it has accumulated,\u201d Scaringi says. The white dwarf still remains once the event is over, but the layer of hydrogen it stole burns away. This type of event is known as a nova, and scientists have known about it for centuries.<\/p>\n\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n<\/source><\/picture>\n
<\/span><\/p>\n
<\/span><\/p>\n
An artistic impression of a white dwarf in a binary system, where a micronova might occur.<\/em><\/figcaption>Image: ESO\/M. Kornmesser, L. Cal\u00e7ada<\/cite><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n<\/figure>\n
But when Scaringi and his team watched these specific white dwarf systems, they saw something different. The team noticed that one white dwarf would brighten for a short amount of time \u2014 just 10 hours or so. \u201cIt was very bright and occurred kind of sporadically in this one object,\u201d Scaringi says. \u201cWe had no clue what we were looking at for about a year.\u201d The bright bursts were too dim and too short to be a typical nova, which usually lasts for weeks at a time.<\/p>\n
Then the team noticed the same short brightening events happen with two other white dwarfs, also in binary systems. That\u2019s when they started to put the pieces together. They realized that all three of these white dwarfs had very intense magnetic fields. The team wondered if the hydrogen that the white dwarfs were pulling off of their neighboring stars was getting funneled onto the stars\u2019 magnetic poles.<\/p>\n
\n
\u201cWe had no clue what we were looking at for about a year.\u201d<\/q><\/aside>\n<\/div>\nAn analogy for how this process works can be found here on Earth with the aurora. Our planet also has a magnetic field, powered by the movement of Earth\u2019s liquid iron core. Charged particles streaming out from our Sun will often get trapped in our magnetic field, where they are then transported to our planet\u2019s northern and southern magnetic poles. That\u2019s what generates the aurora \u2014 also known as the <\/strong>Northern or Southern Lights: the charged particles from the Sun clashing with our atmosphere in those two locations.<\/p>\nScaringi\u2019s team thinks something similar is happening with these white dwarfs, just with much more explosive effects. The white dwarfs\u2019 magnetic fields direct the material streaming off its companion toward very small regions near the poles. As the material builds up in these localized spots, it eventually triggers a thermonuclear explosion \u2014 except they\u2019re much smaller than a regular nova and much more centralized. The researchers think these events are about 1 million times less bright than a regular nova, but they still burn through a lot of material (about the size of a giant asteroid in our Solar System).<\/p>\n
The researchers considered other possible explanations for the brightness, including solar flares, but none quite fit their observations. Of course, nothing is 100 percent certain in science, especially when it comes to a new discovery. And, there are still quite a few unknowns about these phenomena, such as the exact mechanism that would trigger a micronova explosion. It\u2019s also unclear how frequently they occur, though the researchers think they could be happening more often than we expect. \u201cMany systems may do them, and they may do them over and over again,\u201d says Scaringi. \u201cBut because they only last for about 10 hours, maybe 12, if you\u2019re not looking at that object at that time, it will never reveal itself.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Source: https:\/\/www.theverge.com\/2022\/4\/20\/23032402\/micronova-white-dwarf-stars-explosions-magnetic-fields-discovery<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Source: Star explosions can happen on very different scales, from massive supernovae to plain old novae. Now, scientists think they\u2019ve identified an even smaller way for a star\u2019s surface to explode \u2014 dubbed the \u201cmicronova.\u201d It\u2019s a type of explosion that occurs in just one region on the surface of some stars, lasting for hours […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[26,33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4126","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science","category-space"],"yoast_head":"\n
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