Super-rare Supernova Found by Amateur
If there's one thing which makes Astronomy such a levelling science, it's the chances that anybody who looks up, can find something really spectacular.
And one such amateur came across what he thought was a planetary nebula in the constellation of Cassiopeia, but turned out to be something rather different and rare.
What marks planetary nebula out is the shape, either an orb like structure, or a hourglass /butterfly one is most common, but at the heart is a super hot stellar remnant white dwarf, now bombarding the atmosphere of the star with UV and making it glow.
That was not happening to PA30 (the name given to it after his discovery), in fact, it appeared to be bright in IR and not at all in visible light.
The mystery deepened when the nebula was analyzed, turning up no hydrogen or helium, the main two components of almost every star's atmosphere, and winds far excess of anything most planetary nebula produce.
What the astronomer had actually found was a supernova remnant, and one that matched the location of SN1181, observed and recorded in China and Japan but never since found.
But that's not where it stops, because most Supernova are visible at least for a good few thousand years after the event, this was still had no hydrogen or helium and didn't match most expected types of supernova that we know about.
However, there is a very rare type, known as a SN type lax, this is a merger between two white dwarfs, one Carbon and Oxygen rich, and the other Carbon and Neon rich, the total mass exceeds Chandrasekhar limit, causing a supernova, less intense than other types, but lacking the hydrogen and helium which has long since been ejected as planetary nebula in the white dwarf's past.
Source :
In 2023, amateur astronomer Dana Patchick was looking through images from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer archive and discovered a d
