Explosive discovery in Milky Way

ASTRONOMERS have found a unique ‘‘pinwheel’’ star system in our own galaxy, one that will eventually die in a massive explosion that has never been seen before in the Milky Way, a new study published in British journal Nature Astronomy reports.

Scientists believe one of the stars — about 8000 light years from Earth — is the first known candidate in the Milky Way that could produce a dangerous gammaray burst, among the most energetic events in the universe, when it explodes and dies.

‘‘We never expected to find such a system in our own backyard,’’ study coauthor Joseph Callingham, an astronomer with the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, said.

The authors named the star system Apep after a serpent deity from ancient Egyptian mythology that is the mortal enemy of sun god Ra.

Study coauthor Peter Tuthill, of the University of Sydney, said ‘‘the name seemed fitting as the sinuous dust plume looks like a coiled serpent doing battle with a central star’’.

Apep’s stellar winds have created the dust cloud surrounding the system, which consists of a binary star with a fainter companion.

The star is spinning so fast that it is close to ripping itself apart. Scientists are not sure when the star system will finally explode as a supernova, possibly in many thousands of years, but when it does, it will be spectacular. — TCA