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Most supernovae are not that hot, so you don't get the very intense UV radiation. "We need something that is much hotter than our sun - a factor of three or four times hotter. "The simplest way to create UV light is to have something that's very, very hot," Miller said. Because white dwarfs become cooler and cooler as they age, the influx of heat puzzled astronomers. The rare flash, which lasted for a couple days, indicates that something inside or nearby the white dwarf was incredibly hot. To our knowledge, this is actually only the second time a UV flash has been seen with a type Ia supernova." Astronomers have searched for this for years and never found it. "These are some of the most common explosions in the universe," Miller said. They immediately classified SN2019yvq as a type Ia (pronounced "one-A") supernova, a fairly frequent event that occurs when a white dwarf explodes. Within hours, astrophysicists used NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory to study the phenomenon in ultraviolet and X-ray wavelengths. The event, dubbed SN2019yvq, occurred in a relatively nearby galaxy located 140 million light-years from Earth, very close to tail of the dragon-shaped Draco constellation. Using the Zwicky Transient Facility in California, researchers first spotted the peculiar supernova in December 2019 - just a day after it exploded. Miller is a fellow in Northwestern's Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA) and director of the Legacy Survey of Space and Time Corporation Data Science Fellowship Program. The paper will be published on July 23 in the Astrophysical Journal. After a year, the material will be so thin that we will see all the way into the center of the explosion."Īt that point, Miller said, his team will know more about how this white dwarf - and all white dwarfs, which are dense remnants of dead stars - explode. As that material thins, we can see deeper and deeper. "As time passes, the exploded material moves farther away from the source. "The UV flash is telling us something very specific about how this white dwarf exploded," said Northwestern University astrophysicist Adam Miller, who led the research. An extremely rare type of supernova, the event is poised to offer insights into several long-standing mysteries, including what causes white dwarfs to explode, how dark energy accelerates the cosmos and how the universe creates heavy metals, such as iron.