eso_eso1511d July 30th, 2018
Credit: ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2. Acknowledgement: Davide De Martin
This wide-field view shows the sky around the location of the historical exploding star Nova Vul 1670. The remains of the nova are only very faintly visible at the centre of this picture. New observations made with APEX and other telescopes have now revealed that the star that European astronomers saw was not a nova, but a much rarer, violent breed of stellar collision. It was spectacular enough to be easily seen with the naked eye during its first outburst, but the traces it left were so faint that very careful analysis using submillimetre telescopes was needed before the mystery could finally be unravelled more than 340 years later.
Provider: European Southern Observatory
Image Source: https://www.eso.org/public/images/eso1511d/
Curator: European Southern Observatory, Garching bei München, None, Germany
Image Use Policy: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
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