A Dead Star Has Been Emitting A Shockwave For A Thousand Years, And No One Knows Why

After the cluster SPT2349-56 which undermined our theories and this curious exoplanet, a new curiosity has just been spotted. 730 light years from our home, a white dwarf (the inert remains of a defunct star), named RXJ0528+2838, was detected by the Isaac Newton Telescope (INT) located in La Palma, Spain. There are an infinite number of white dwarfs, but this one has the particularity of emitting, for a millennium, a violent arcing shock wave (“ bow shock »), which should, theoretically, not exist.

This phenomenon was the subject of a publication on January 12 in the journal Nature Astronomyand left its authors speechless. For Simone Scaringi, researcher at the University of Durham (England), RXJ0528+2838 is a pure anomaly: “ We found something never seen before and, more importantly, totally unexpected “. Normally, a white dwarf is supposed to be cold and inactive, the complete opposite of this : why is she so agitated?

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RXJ0528+2838: the rebel of white dwarfs

Usually, when a white dwarf becomes excited like this, it is because it has an accretion disk, which is a ring of gas ripped off from a nearby star that serves as fuel to expel matter. This is not the case for RXJ0528+2838, which once passed under the keen eyes of MUSE (Multi-Unit Spectroscopic Explorer) of Very Large Telescope (VLT), clearly proved that she was “ nue ». However, this does not prevent it from regularly spitting out energy in the form of ultra-fast plasma jets and charged particles, propelled at supersonic speeds in the vacuum of space, since the time of the Crusades!

« Our observations reveal a powerful flow that, according to our current understanding, should not be there », says Krystian Iłkiewicz, co-author of the study. Where could it come from, then? For the team, it is possible that the magnetic field of RXJ0528+2838 behaves like a gigantic cannon. Instead of storing gas in a disk as is normally the case, the star’s magnetic lines of force would latch onto the flow of matter from its companion star.

This gas, trapped in a magnetic vice, would then be violently accelerated and catapulted outwards. Propelled in this way, it would form the famous shock wave, like the wake that a ship leaves after passing through the oceans.

But even with this explanation, everything does not add up. RXJ0528+2838 being dead, its magnetic field should be far too weak to maintain such a rhythm over such a long period. According to our astrophysical simulation models, it could only fuel such an expulsion for a few hundred yearsat most.

Maybe we are facing un energy transfer mechanism still unknownand that the “ mystery engine » (to use Scaringi’s terms) of RXJ0528+2838 is only the emerged part of new inherent physical processes to the binary systems that we are only just touching on. Considering the population of white dwarfs in the cosmos and even in our own Milky Way, how many other deceased stars are still spinning at full speed even though we do not know of their existence? An absolutely dizzying question on which the astrophysical community will have to look intobecause if this is the case, an entire section of our understanding of the life and death cycle of stars needs to be revised. Maybe our cosmos is full of these ghosts who refuse to die : a discovery that would force astrophysics theorists to survive a few sleepless nights and overtime to reclassify these space retirees.