Astronomers observe star reborn in a flash

A mystery to astronomer's is still the full evolution and life cycles of a star. But we are getting closer..

An international team of astronomers using Hubble have been able to study stellar evolution in real time. Over a period of 30 years dramatic increases in the temperature of the star SAO 244567 have been observed.

Credit ESA/Hubble & NASA

Now the star is cooling again, having been reborn into an earlier phase of stellar evolution. This makes it the first reborn star to have been observed during both the heating and cooling stages of rebirth.

SAO 244567, 2700 light-years from Earth, is the central star of the Stingray Nebula and has been visibly evolving between observations made over the last 45 years. Between 1971 and 2002 the surface temperature of the star skyrocketed by almost 40 000 degrees Celsius.

Now new observations made with the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) on the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have revealed that SAO 244567 has started to cool and expand.