Contact Information:R. Mark Wagner520-626-3006[email protected]
(EDITORS: The NASA/Harvard Chandra X-ray Observatory news release issued at the "Two Years of Science with Chandra" symposium Sept. 6 is online at http://chandra.harvard.edu and at the UA News website, http://uanews.org)
Astronomers using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory have discovered a burst of X-rays and cyclical pulsing from a white dwarf star that has just undergone a thermonuclear explosion.
Sumner Starrfield of Arizona State University leads the international team which is reporting observations of Nova Aquila today at the "Two Years of Science with Chandra" symposium in Washington, D.C. (See release below).
Chandra team member R. Mark Wagner of the Large Binocular Telescope Observatory at the University of Arizona analyzed the data that revealed the curious cyclical pulses in Nova Aquila's X-ray emission.
"Neither the brief X-ray burst nor periodic X-ray fluctuations have been seen before in a nova outburst, "Wagner said.
"We have too few statistics to know whether the short (15 minute) X-ray burst is typical of most novae. We also don't have a mechanism in mind at the moment to explain it. It would take extended Chandra observations of future novae to know whether such events are frequent or rare."
"We were surprised by data that revealed the cyclical changes in X-ray brightness, caused by the white dwarf expanding and shrinking over a 40-minute period," Wagner said. Temperatures on the surface of the white dwarf were 300,000 degrees Celsius, making Nova Aquila one of the hottest stars ever observed to undergo such pulsations.
***UA news is online @ http://uanews.org***
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