mysterious light show in space

In January 2002, a star named V838 Monocerotis suddenly became 600,000 times brighter than the sun, briefly becoming the brightest star in the Milky Way. NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has captured the explosion in all its glory, showing the reverberation of light — the “light echo” — spreading into space and reflecting off layers of dust surrounding the star itself. (See the images at http://hubblesite.org/news/2003/10.) V838 Mon’s outburst is extraordinary. Unlike a nova, an exploding star that ejects its outer layers and heats up to hundreds of thousands of degrees Fahrenheit, V838 Mon has ballooned enormously in size, and cooled to light-bulb temperature levels. Howard E. Bond of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore and his colleagues describe the star’s mysterious eruption in the March 27 Nature. Their assessment says it all: “V383 Mon represents a hitherto unknown type of stellar outburst, for which we have no completely satisfactory physical explanation.”

This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the Boston Globe’s Health/Science section on 4/01/2003.