Scientists have now uncovered a 350 year old mystery explosion in space regarding a rare and violent stellar collision in this new video from the European Southern Observatory.
This extremely rare event was witnessed by 17th century astronomers including Hevelius and Cassini where they observed and documented a new star sighting in the skies of 1670.
Hevelius classified the star as nova sub capite Cygni but modern astronomers now call it Nova Vulpeculae 1670. During its first outburst, it was easily seen with the naked eye however, remnants and traces of it were almost undetectable that scientists could not find any clues not until a hundred years later with the advent of submillimeter telescopes.
Scientists first believed that this object is a nova or an exploding white dwarf however, when it was observed and studied more, it was apparently a different kind of stellar object.
Nova Vul 1670 was observed to have different degrees of brightness in the last two years where it disappeared and reappeared again twice before finally vanishing a few years later.
Modern astronomers believe that most novae are caused by explosive behavior of close binary stars but the Nova Vul 1670 did not fit this type of model. In the 1980s, there were still no technology available to confirm this stellar object and scientists considered this as a faint nebula.
This new research however finally unraveled the mystery using the APEX (Atacama Pathfinder EXperiment) telescope and the Effelsberg radio telescope and determined the chemical composition and ratios of the different isotopes involved in its gas.
According to lead author of the study, Tomasz Kaminski, while probing the area with submillimeter and radio wavelengths, the remnants are composed of cool gas with an unusual chemical mix of molecules.These findings determined that this mass of cool material was too massive for a nova explosion.
Astronomers now conclude that this is a violent, colossal collision between two stars which is an extremely rare event when one star explodes as two stars merge with each other. The remnants then left a faint, cool environment of dust and molecules into space.
This study is published in the journal, Nature.