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The team, which includes the Nobel-prize winning astronomer and astrophysicist

June 15, 2019 by Catherine Pope

The team, which includes the Nobel-prize winning astronomer and astrophysicist Robert S. Susskind, is now in the process of looking at η Carinae in more detail, which they hope will give astronomers an idea of the size of this event.

What's more, it's clear to see that the events that triggered the Great Eruption are not simply a result of the two merging. The star, in fact, is an incredibly small star at 1.5 million light years across, but it's actually in an orbit that would appear to be much more like a giant star—about the size of Rhode Island. That's a fairly massive star, but it's actually far smaller and much cooler than the larger one. It's also about 4.1 billion light years from Earth, so it's only a few hundred light years from Earth. And that's before we even mention that the star is actually a huge, elliptical giant.

The evidence that the Great Eruption came about was just beginning to become clear. In 2004, Susskind and colleagues estimated that the stellar mass of the star was about 1,700 times that of the Sun. But in their paper, they argue that they didn't find that the star was a supernova. Instead, they say, it was a supernova that's occurred twice since then and that the star was in orbit around the star.

"The first time the star had an explosion, it was a supernova," Susskind says. "But that's why they couldn't get a supernova off the planet. The star was in a very hot, very dense state of plasma, and the explosion was very small. And we couldn't even get an exobiology for the star at that time."

The team's findings do not mean that the Big Bang never occurred. Even a supernova can't completely obliterate a star. But the astronomers are sure that a huge star that exploded before the Big Bang could have been one of the largest in the Universe.

In a recent talk, Susskind and his colleagues discussed how they've come to the conclusion that there are more Supernovas in the Universe than any other supernova ever recorded. But they note that this is a new kind of supernova that could've produced a lot more supernovas.

"This is not a very new idea that's been proposed before," Susskind says.

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