"Oddball Supernova" Appears Strangely Cool Before Exploding

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

'Oddball supernova' appears strangely cool before exploding:

A curiously yellow star has caused astrophysicists to reevaluate what's possible within our universe.

Led by Northwestern University, the international team used NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to examine the massive star two-and-a-half years before it exploded into a supernova. At the end of their lives, cool, yellow stars are typically shrouded in hydrogen, which conceals the star's hot, blue interior. But this yellow star, located 35 million lightyears from Earth in the Virgo galaxy cluster, was mysteriously lacking this crucial hydrogen layer at the time of its explosion.

"We haven't seen this scenario before," said Northwestern's Charles Kilpatrick, who led the study. "If a star explodes without hydrogen, it should be extremely blue -- really, really hot. It's almost impossible for a star to be this cool without having hydrogen in its outer layer. We looked at every single stellar model that could explain a star like this, and every single model requires that the star had hydrogen, which, from its supernova, we know it did not. It stretches what's physically possible."

The team describes the peculiar star and its resulting supernova in a new study, which was published today (May 5) in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. In the paper, the researchers hypothesize that, in the years preceding its death, the star might have shed its hydrogen layer or lost it to a nearby companion star.

Read more of this story at SoylentNews.