NASA spacecraft was 'hit' by a bright, never-before-seen object

When reviewing data from exoplanet hunter TESS, the scientists encountered what was not a planet, but a dazzling beam of light from the unidentifiable object.

TESS, a spacecraft carrying a super-space telescope, on a mission to hunt for potentially habitable exoplanets, has captured a brand new astronomical object called a "micronova" - "micronova" ".

"Micronovae are extremely powerful events, but small for astronomical scale," the Sci-News newspaper quoted the conclusion of a team led by astronomer Simone Scaringi from the University of Durham (England).

White dwarf star (small white object) that produced micronovae ejected from the poles after a superfluous because of its "blood-sucking" companion, a red giant.

The team said that they were analyzing data from TESS when they discovered three bright beams of light coming from the three binary star systems TV Columbae, EI Ursae Majoris and ASASSN-19bh. The main beams are micronovae.

Two micronovae come from known white dwarfs, TV Columbae and EI Ursae Majoris, but the third micronova, ASASSN-19bh, requires more observations with the X-Shooter instrument on the Very Large Telescope (VLT) ) of ESO to confirm its white dwarf status.

Micronovae show up in telescope data as bright optical beams that last for several hours. It occurs at the magnetic poles of white dwarfs, where hydrogen is stored. The reason is that these white dwarfs have previously had "vampire" behavior, sucking blood from their companions. Sometimes they get overloaded and create small explosions - micronovas.

This event is very powerful but much smaller than a supernova - the end-of-life explosion that tore apart a white dwarf. A white dwarf is a form of stellar corpse, created after a star like the Sun runs out of energy, collapsing after a period of swelling into a red giant.