For one brief moment, this star ruled the entire galaxy

Nobody even knew the wiz V838 Monocerotis existed before it suddenly became the bright ace in the total whitish Way in January 2002 . But we do n’t actually know why this whizz short became 600,000 time bright than the Sun .

The hotshot ’s brief reign as our galaxy ’s brightest star did n’t last long , and it fade back into obscurity almost as quickly as it had appear in the first position . Almost a decade subsequently , astronomers still are n’t exactly sure what caused this tremendously bright ebullition , but there are some hypothesis , one of which is the so - called light echo . A NASA uranologist explains :

It ’s honest that supernovae and novae expel matter out into blank space . But while the V838 Mon flash appears to expel fabric into quad , what is seen here is really an outwardly moving light-headed sound reflection of the vivid flash . In a easy echo , light from the flare is speculate by successively more distant ring in the ambient interstellar dust that already surrounded the wiz . V838 Mon lies about 20,000 short years away toward the configuration of Monoceros the unicorn . In this Hubble Space Telescope image from February 2004 , the light replication is about six abstemious years in diam .

Hostinger Coupon Code 15% Off