From CNET.com (Nov. 8):
Stars usually die in a flash (literally), but astronomers have found a mysterious specimen that keeps exploding and exploding.
"This supernova breaks everything we thought we knew about how they work," Iair Arcavi said in a statement. Arcavi is a NASA Einstein postdoctoral fellow at California's Las Cumbres Observatory. "It's the biggest puzzle I've encountered in almost a decade of studying stellar explosions."
An Arcavi-led study on the zombie supernova appeared Wednesday in the journal Nature.
At the end of their lives, most large stars collapse into black holes or go out with a big bang in a supernova explosion that burns bright but then fades quickly, usually after just a few months. So it's very weird that a supernova named iPTF14hls appears to have exploded 50 years ago only to survive and start exploding again in 2014. In fact the ongoing explosion, or the remnants of it, can still be seen today. [read more]
That is strange. It’s almost like some stellar or gas debris is feeding it so it can explode again.
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