Hasta La Gadget!

Astronomers have used ever-mysterious supernovas to help measure the expansion of the universe for decades, but now may finally have an answer as to what causes them in the first place.

Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, astronomers at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Germany studied Type 1a supernovae in Andromeda and five nearby elliptical galaxies, according to AFP. They found that almost all of them come from two white dwarf stars merge; if one comes from accretion, or the drawing in of material from a companion star, it would be 50 times brighter in x-rays, the report said.

White dwarf pairs are extremely rare, but the study–published in the February 18th edition of Nature–said that once white dwarfs spiral close enough to merge, the explosion occurs within a few tenths of a second. (Image credit: NASA/JPL/Chandra-Spitzer X-ray/Infrared hybrid)