File:Hubble captures infrared glow of a kilonova blast.jpg

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English: These images taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope reveal a new type of stellar explosion produced from the merger of two compact objects.

Hubble spotted the outburst while looking at the aftermath of a short-duration gamma-ray burst, a mysterious flash of intense high-energy radiation that appears from random directions in space. Short-duration blasts last at most a few seconds. They sometimes, however, produce faint afterglows in visible and near-infrared light that continue for several hours or days and help astronomers to pinpoint the exact location of the burst.

In the image on the left, the galaxy in the centre produced the gamma-ray burst, designated GRB 130603B. A probe of the galaxy with Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 on June 13, 2013, revealed a glow in near-infrared light at the source of the gamma-ray burst, shown in the top right image. When Hubble observed the same location on July 3, the source had faded, shown in the below right image. The fading glow provided key evidence that it was the decaying fireball of a new type of stellar blast called a "kilonova".

Kilonovas are about 1000 times brighter than a nova, which is caused by the eruption of a white dwarf. But they are 1/10th to 1/100th the brightness of a typical supernova, the self-detonation of a massive star.
Date
Source http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/opo1329a/
Author NASA, ESA, N. Tanvir (University of Leicester), A. Fruchter (STScI), and A. Levan (University of Warwick)

Licensing

Public domain This file is in the public domain because it was created by NASA and ESA. NASA Hubble material (and ESA Hubble material prior to 2009) is copyright-free and may be freely used as in the public domain without fee, on the condition that only NASA, STScI, and/or ESA is credited as the source of the material. This license does not apply if ESA material created after 2008 or source material from other organizations is in use.
The material was created for NASA by Space Telescope Science Institute under Contract NAS5-26555, or for ESA by the Hubble European Space Agency Information Centre. Copyright statement at hubblesite.org or 2008 copyright statement at spacetelescope.org. For material created by the European Space Agency on the spacetelescope.org site since 2009, use the {{ESA-Hubble}} tag.

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5 August 2013

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