Astronomers Discover First-of-Their-Kind Doomed Stars On Our Doorstep – ryan

Scientists have discovered an extremely rare pair of stars only around 150 light years away in the Milky Way galaxy that will collide and explode in 23 billion years.

The blast—were we around to see it—would appear around 10 times brighter than the moon in the night sky.

This form of explosion, known as a “type Ia supernova” occurs when a white dwarf—the dense core remnant of a star—builds too much mass and is unable to withstand its own gravity and explodes.

The discovery of the binary star system was made by astronomers at the University of Warwick in England.

“We predict that the binary will explode dynamically by means of a double detonation that will destroy both stars just before they merge,” appearing as a type Ia supernova with a peak apparent magnitude that’s around 200,000 times brighter than Jupiter, the researchers noted in the study.

Lead researcher James Munday said in a statement: “Discovering that the two stars are separated by just 1/60th of the Earth-sun distance, I quickly realized that we had discovered the first double white dwarf binary that will undoubtedly lead to a type 1a supernova on a timescale close to the age of the universe.”

Supernovae events occur when large stars run out of fuel and collapse under their own weight, exploding due to “strong shock waves that propel out of their interiors,” NASA explains.

Research has shown that type Ia supernovae originate from some binary star systems containing at least one white dwarf. While supernovae occur about once every 50 years, type Ia supernovae are much rarer, happening around once every 500 years in the Milky Way, NASA notes.

The binary star system discovered in the new study is the heaviest of its kind that’s ever been confirmed, with a combined mass that’s 1.56 times that of the sun. At this magnitude, the two stars are destined to explode.

During a close orbit, the heavier white dwarf of the pair gradually accumulates material from its partner, which sees that star, or both stars, explode.

The explosion, however, will not take place for another 23 billion years, and despite being so close to our solar system, the explosion will not be a threat to Earth.

The two white dwarfs are currently spiraling around each other in an orbit taking longer than 14 hours. Over billions of years, gravity will see the two stars eventually move so fast that they complete an orbit in a mere 30 to 40 seconds just before the type Ia supernovae takes place.

Ingrid Pelisoli, an assistant professor at the University of Warwick who is another author of the latest study added: “This is a very significant discovery. Finding such a system on our galactic doorstep is an indication that they must be relatively common, otherwise we would have needed to look much further away, searching a larger volume of our galaxy, to encounter them.”

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Reference

Munday, J., Pakmor, R., Pelisoli, I., Jones, D., Sahu, S., Tremblay, P.-E., Rajamuthukumar, A. S., Nelemans, G., Magee, M., Toonen, S., Bédard, A., & Cunningham, T. (2025). A super-Chandrasekhar mass type Ia supernova progenitor at 49 pc set to detonate in 23 Gyr. Nature Astronomy.