VIDEO: Telescope captures 'mysterious whirlpool' in night sky over Hawaii
A videograb shows the 'mysterious whirlpool' in night sky over Hawaii.
A Japanese telescope in Hawaii captured 'mysterious whirlpool' in night sky over the island nation.
Images captured by Mauna Kea Observatory showed a mysterious "whirlpool" in the night sky.
Scientists believe the flying spiral is likely related to the SpaceX recent satellite launch from Cape Canaveral in Florida earlier that day.
On the other hand, supernovas are not always so super. These explosions that mark the death of a star often are spectacularly energetic. But once in a while they are a complete dud.
Scientists on Wednesday detailed one of the duds — a massive star that had so much of its material siphoned off by the gravitational tug of a companion star in a stellar marriage called a binary system that by the time it came to explode at the end of its life cycle it could barely manage a whimper.
Its eventual explosion was so tame, in fact, that the collapsed star — now an incredibly dense object called a neutron star - remains in a docile circular orbit with its companion.
A more powerful explosion at the very least would have resulted in a more oval-shaped orbit and even could have sent the star and its companion hurtling in opposite directions.
This binary system, studied using a telescope at the Chile-based Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, is located about 11,000 light years from Earth in our Milky Way galaxy in the direction of the constellation Puppis.
A light year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km).
