[MUSIC]
[Inside the Image / Hubble Space Telescope]
[V838 Mon]
This is an object called V838
Monocerotis, or V838 Mon,
and it's a series
of images of the same object
that are taken over
about a half a year or so in 2002.
So, we see the central object
here is the same
in each of the four images.
But what is immediately apparent is that
there's an expanding
brightness around it.
So what was first thought would be that,
wow, we've got this gas cloud
that is just spewing away
from this object,
but it was spewing away
at incredibly fast speeds.
What is actually happening here,
instead of that gas
itself being in motion
and causing that expansion
is something called a light echo.
So just like you hear an echo
with sound waves, as some sound waves
come directly towards you,
you hear the main source of sound.
But then as others bounce off walls
and come to you a little bit later,
that's where the echo comes from.
The same thing is happening
with light in this image.
We're seeing some of that light
coming directly towards us.
We're seeing that
at the time that we receive it.
But some of the rest of the light
is actually bouncing off material around
that binary in the center.
It bounces off it,
and then it comes to us.
That's the light echo.
And so each one of those
succeeding images
where we see this shell
further and further from the center
is actually that light echo
coming to us later in time.
So we're actually basically
taking a CAT scan
of the material around that central star.
There's still a lot of mystery
surrounding
where that material came from.
Is it being blown off
by these hot, young,
energetic stars
as a process of their star formation?
One of the coolest possibilities
is that one of these stars
actually engulfed
a giant planet in its orbit.
So like a giant planet, like many times
the mass of Jupiter could be in orbit
very close to this very hot, large star.
And the tidal forces
and the energy dissipation
could have been acting on it
in such a way that that now
massive planet
is losing energy,
spinning more rapidly
and closer
to one of those stars,
and eventually gets engulfed in
an explosive event.
Could have been a large planet.
Could have been
a small star in that system.
We don't know what the mass of that
intruder
was, that interloper
that caused this explosive event.
But it is very likely
that it was something
in the neighborhood
of that binary system
that just got too close
to one of those stars, got sucked in,
and we saw this explosion as a result.
[MUSIC]
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