🔄FROM THE ARCHIVE: We're disappointed, too.
This image shows V838 Mon, which exploded as a "red nova" in January 2002, suddenly becoming 600,000 times brighter than our Sun. A similar explosion was expected to occur in 2022, but the unprecedented prediction recently fell through. It’s time to face a hard truth. Good science is mostly about meticulously testing informed predictions. And, sadly, these predictions often fall flat.
Five years ago, Calvin College astronomy professor Larry Molnar and his team began analyzing a pair of tightly bound stars — known as KIC 9832227 — located just 1,800 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus the Swan. The researchers then bolstered their own observations with archival data from 1999, as well as data collected between 2007 and 2013.
To verify Molnar’s original prediction, Socia and his team concentrated on a gap in observational data — from 1999 to 2007 — for KIC 9832227. After obtaining previously unpublished data captured in 2003, the researchers discovered a curious discrepancy between when the two stars were expected to eclipse each other, and when they actually did. This led Socia to dig a little deeper.
Molnar’s original prediction of a 2022 merger was based off the apparent exponential decay of KIC 9832227’s orbital period. He then matched this slowing orbital period with models of previously seen mergers, finding that the slowing orbit falls in line with what would be expected from a pair of touching stars preparing to put on a show. However, since KIC 9832227’s orbital period is not changing quite as dramatically as Molnar first though, his model-based prediction no longer holds water.
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