WASHINGTON—Astronomers have observed in a relatively nearby galaxy a star that not only survived what ordinarily should have been certain death—a stellar explosion called a supernova—but emerged from it brighter than before the blast.
Meet the “zombie star.”
The star at issue, observed with the Hubble Space Telescope, is a kind known as a white dwarf, an incredibly dense object with about the mass of the sun crammed into the size of Earth. A white dwarf is the remaining core of a star that blew off a lot of its material at the end of its life cycle, as our sun is expected to do about 5 billion years from now….