This Star Is Basically Immortal

The Odd Index

This star exploded… and came back from the dead. Meet the “Zombie Star” iPTF14hls — the supernova that refuses to die. 🌌🧟‍♂️  #ZombieStar #SpaceFacts #Supernova #Astronomy #WeirdScience

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00:00Imagine a star so stubborn. It explodes, survives, and then explodes again.

00:06This isn't science fiction. This is the story of IPTF-14HLS, the zombie star that refuses to stay

00:14dead. Usually when a massive star dies, it goes out in style, a spectacular supernova,

00:21one blinding flash, then darkness, a one-time cosmic farewell. But in 2014, astronomers saw

00:29something that broke the rules. A star in a distant galaxy, 500 million light-years away,

00:35went supernova, and kept shining. Not just for weeks, not just for months, but for two years.

00:44And its brightness kept going up and down, almost like it was breathing. Then came the real twist.

00:51Digging through old telescope images, scientists found the same star had already gone supernova,

00:56back in 1954. Somehow, it had exploded and survived at least once before.

01:05So what's going on? One theory is a pair-instability supernova, where extreme heat turns light into

01:13matter and antimatter inside the star's core. This triggers violent pulses that can blast off

01:19layers of the star, over and over, without fully destroying it. It's like the universe's version

01:26won't finish popping. But there's a problem. No known model can explain explosions decades apart

01:33with this much power. Meaning we might be looking at something completely new, and we have no idea if

01:39it's gone for good this time. For now, it remains a cosmic enigma, a restless star, too stubborn to fade

01:46away. It's out there, somewhere in the dark, maybe plotting its next outburst. After all, the dead don't

01:54always stay dead. Like and subscribe and comment with your favorite strange astronomy facts.

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