It’s a solid doomsday prediction that in about 5 billion years the dying sun will expand as a bloated red giant and engulf the Earth.

But imagine if in just a few weeks the middle-aged sun suddenly ballooned out to the orbit of Saturn and immediately vaporized Earth and most of the other planets in the solar system! And, even before this happened, imagine that every morning you awoke the sun was ever more sweltering until it began evaporating the oceans, spontaneously starting forests ablaze, and melting asphalt!

This sounds like the stuff of a far-out science fiction movie. But astronomers think that they actually witnessed such an even in 2002. A sunlike star on the edge of our galaxy abruptly grew 600,000 times brighter in a few weeks and ballooned 1,000 times its diameter. Alien astronomers on neighboring galaxies would have dutifully noted it as it briefly becoming one of the brightest stars in our Milky Way galaxy.

Now, eight years later astronomers remain puzzled as to what happened to the star, called V838 Monocerotis, and are still doing interstellar forensic detective work.

The blast was not a supernova – the explosive death of a massive star—because a red giant is now in the location of the outburst. The event was too powerful to be a nova, where a white dwarf companion to a giant star explodes.

The brilliant hiccup of light from the flashbulb-like outburst continues reverberating off interstellar dust clouds. This light echo has been photo documented by the Hubble Space Telescope as one of the most bizarre faster-than-light illusions ever seen in space.

The dilemma has been to explain how a star can go rogue – or rather go rouge — almost literally overnight.

Things have gotten only stranger. A team has just published their observations of X-rays coming from the red giant star. Red giants are cool stars and don’t emit X-rays. To do so they would have to spin rapidly and have entangled magnetic fields. The loopy fields would entrap gas, heat it to millions of degrees, and then snap like rubber bands to emit titanic stellar flares.

But the spin rate of a red giant should be slow. By swelling in size the rotational rate slows down to conserve angular momentum, like a twirling figure skater extending their arms to de-spin. A rapidly spinning red giant could be forensic evidence for a stellar head on collision that preceded the outburst.

The idea being kicked around is that V838 Mon. was originally a triple-star system. A gravitational billiard game among the three stars sent two of them careening together and explosively merge into a single star. The heat from the impact caused the new star to swell up, like a runaway hot air balloon. This is supported by the observation that a few weeks after the initial burst, the stars suddenly got an additional 1,000 times brighter in just on day. This might have been from the nuclear cores of the stars merging.

There is a stellar companion that could be the culprit that stated the mess. It was observed as a hot blue star in the vicinity of the precursor star to the red giant. But it mysteriously vanished after the blast. The belief is that it was engulfed in a cloud of dust blown out by the collision and is hidden from view for now.

Thankfully, V838 Mon is only a few million years old and dwells in a young open stars cluster. So it is not old enough for life as we know it to have arisen and evolved.

But imagine the terror and gloom of living under a planet-wide death sentence by knowing the exact time your entire world and planetary system was going to go up in smoke!

Say bye bye to duplicate content.
Now, with WordPress Uniquefier v3.4 all your articles are 100% unique
What is Uniquefier and how is it going to help you?
Uniquefier is a WordPress Plugin which once activated will turn your blog content from duplicate to unique. All it takes is 1 single click to activate the plugin and everything will be 100% unique content.
You may be wondering how is this possible? Well, it is indeed, and no it’s not one of those article rewriters or any spinners you may have heard of. More, the articles will be the same for your site visitors, the changes which are being made to the articles are in the backpage, in the page source, changes which are not visible to the visitors, but only to the search engines bots and browsers. We are not adding hiding text or any kind of such activities which are strictly forbidden, the Uniquefier uses a simple, yet highly effective mechanism of turning your articles unique. It is a well known fact that search engines (for google has been proofed) can run and index non advanced JavaScript from your pages. This is why, by using a special technique we place the original articles under a JavaScript run. This way:

• you get original content as the way you show the articles is different than just a pure copy+paste
• search engines understand what an untrained human eye can’t

Click here to view more details