There’s a "zombie star" left over from an explosion in the year 1181 that’s still hauling ass through space at 10,000 miles per second.
arXiv · March 13, 2026 · 2603.11190
Why it matters
Most supernovas destroy the star, but this 845-year-old remnant hosts a 'central star' that survived the blast. It is currently radiating heat at 200,000 Kelvin and shows that the original event was a rare 'partial' explosion between two white dwarfs.
From the abstract
Pa 30 has been identified as the nebular remnant of the historical SN 1181. It is host to a hot ($\approx200,000\,{\rm K}$) central star (WD J005311) with a fast wind ($\approx16,000\,{\rm km\,s^{-1}}$) radiating at roughly the Eddington luminosity for a solar mass ($\approx1.5\times10^{38}\,{\rm erg\,s^{-1}}$). We explore the thermal evolution of this star to understand how it progressed toward the state it is observed as today as well as to constrain its underlying physical properties. We deve