Huge star system near Earth could produce one of the most spectacular explosions in the universe
'Apep' would be able to launch a stream of energy across space
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Your support makes all the difference.Scientists have spotted a star system like none ever seen before in our own galaxy, which could be about to launch one of the most spectacular and powerful explosions in the universe.
Thankfully, the extremely powerful and narrow jet of plasma that it will shoot off into the universe when it explodes isn't aimed towards Earth. If it were, it would strip ozone off our own atmosphere.
Still, Earth will surprisingly have a front-row seat. Scientists from around the world were shocked to find the massive, new star system sitting in our own galaxy.
"It was not expected such a system would be found in our galaxy – only in younger galaxies much further away," said Benjamin Pope, a NASA Sagan fellow at New York University's Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics and one of the researchers. "Given its brightness, it is surprising it was not discovered a lot sooner."
The swirling cloud of dust is a mere 8,000 light years from Earth is a vast system made up of two shockingly bright stars. The astronomers who found it named it "Apep", after the Egyptian god of chaos, reflecting the intensity and vastness of the system but also the curling shape of the snake-god, which matches its whirling appearance.
The two bright stars orbit each other every hundred years or so, according to the researchers. As they do, a fast wind is thrown off, moving as fast as 12 million kilometres an hour.
Eventually the system is going to throw out a long-duration gamma-ray burst, according to the astronomers who found it. They can last just a couple of seconds but throw out as much energy as the sun will emit in its whole lifetime.
The two stars appear to be rotating so fast that they are close to ripping each other apart. It's that fast rotation that scientists expect will mean that Apep is likely to throw out one of the GRBs when its core collapses at the end of its life.
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