The mystery of supernova explosion observed in Korea in the 15th century will be clarified in the 21st century

About 600 years ago a star shining in the sky was found in Korea. This light disappeared for a while, but Korean astronomers left a record as a mysterious star. The mystery of 600 years ago has been successfully solved by modern astronomers by computerized database analysis.

Proper-motion age dating of the progeny of Nova Scorpii AD 1437: Nature: Nature Research
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v548/n7669/abs/nature23644.html

On 11th March 1473, in Hanayang (presently Seoul) in Korea, stars that emit extraordinary light in the night sky were observed. According to astronomers' record, the light of this star continued to shine for 14 days before it disappeared. This celestial event observed in the latter half of the 15th century was "Supernova (explosion)American researchers clarified what was happening.

One of the states that a star takes in the terminal phase "White dwarfIn the case of large ones, they have extremely large gravity and absorb the surrounding stars by absorbing them. Hydrogen drawn into the white dwarfs constitutes a layer and nuclear fusion takes place as the potential energy changes to heat in the process of being sucked in, so nuclear fusion may occur on the surface of the white dwarf, and the hydrogen stored in the surface layer It may cause supernova explosion to release at once.


Dr. Michael Shala of the American Museum of Natural History have been exploring the causes of the mysterious stars observed in the 15th century for more than 30 years. Dr. Shara et al. Adopted a method of creating image databases of many celestial bodies and finding changes in celestial bodies by comparing images. We measured the amount of stars moved in the 20th century and estimated the traveling route of the stars to date back several centuries based on it, the location where the star was in 1437 coincides with the center of the nova I understood that. In other words, the mysterious star seen by Korean astronomers in 1437 was a supernova explosion.


Dr. Shara has decided to expand the search area by newly adding data for the past ten years which he has not used so far. Then, it seems that the nebula and the gas and dust data of the universe which were supposed to lead to this discovery were found right next to the area studied so far. According to Dr. Shara, the task of finding astronomical phenomena from enormous data is "to find a needle out of billions of straws". However, by creating a database that digitizes astronomical observation images, it seems that you can create a system like "Google search on hundreds of millions of stars", a huge database was almost impossible in the 1980s It seems to make it possible to elucidate the mystery. Dr. Shara says, "If you expanded the scope of the database to a small extent, it would have been the same discovery this time before."