An international team of astronomers discovered that the star's explosion, known as the nova CK Chanterelles (Nova Vulpeculae 1670), actually happened five times further than previously thought. This makes the cosmic phenomenon observed in 1670 more energetic and puts it in a class of flares of unknown nature. A preprint of the article was published in the arXiv.org repository.
The new data finally refuted the generally accepted model, according to which the catastrophic event occurred in a close binary system, one of the components of which was a white dwarf. This version has been repeatedly revised by a number of scientists, who assumed that it was in fact a collision of two ordinary stars, or a merger of a white dwarf with a brown dwarf – an intermediate link between gas giants and the smallest stars. However, it has now become clear that Chanterelle's SC is much further away and ejects gas at a higher speed than scientists believed.
Using the GNIRS (Gemini Near-Infrared Spectrograph) astronomical spectrograph, the researchers measured the expansion rate of the nebula left after the explosion at seven million kilometers per hour. It turned out that it is located at a distance of 10 thousand light years from the Sun instead of two thousand light years. This means that the explosion released 25 times more energy than previous calculations showed.
Thus, in terms of the amount of released energy, Vulpeculae 1670 occupies an intermediate position between novae and supernovae. However, the cause of this explosion is still unknown.
