Such an explosion could destroy all traces of life on Earth in less than a day.
When a star dies, there are several possible scenarios. If it would not have exploded in a supernova, will collapse itself has merged after the hydrogen into helium.
With the rise in pressure and temperature as a result of the collapse, the star are helium will fuse together into (usually) carbon, so that will swell the star, and is a red giant. Once the helium is consumed, the giant collapses again, but the resulting energy is not enough to start the carbon fusion.
At this point, the outer layers are expelled into space as a planetary nebula, and only the very dense core remains (the sun’s mass condensed into the size of the Earth) known as a white dwarf.
Ultraviolent surface explosions
White dwarfs are therefore extremely dense masses and in a binary system, it happens that they attract the lightest elements, such as hydrogen, their binomial. It is in such systems that scientists have discovered a phenomenon that until now was not known.
Using the TESS, a space telescope launched in 2018, astronomers noticed abnormal flashes. The TESS is a tool specifically designed to monitor the light variations of stars and thereby detect the drop in brightness when a planet passes in front of its star at regular intervals.
This mysterious bursts could eventually thermonuclear explosions similar to nova about ten hours (when the entire layer of hydrogen on the surface explodes at once, leaving the white dwarf), but in a less powerful and more localized way, hence the term ” micro Nova “.
A mechanism similar to dawn borealis
These phenomena, which remained unexplained for a long time, participated white dwarfs whose magnetic field is very high. The scientists hope the hydrogen being stolen on the poles by the white dwarf. On earth we find a phenomenon equivalent to the charged particles from the Sun is deflected by our magnetosphere and forming the aurora borealis.
In the case of hydrogen, the reaction is much more spectacular because it leads to a thermonuclear explosion. Even if it remains 1 million times fainter than a classical nova, this explosion consumes an enormous amount of matter (more than 100,000 times the mass of Everest).
The energy released could destroy everything we know in less than a day. Because this is a new discovery, of course there are many unknowns, such as the exact trigger mechanism or the frequency with which the phenomenon is repeated.
