A newly discovered explosive star system in the Milky Way has been named Apep after an Egyptian Snake God. The god was also known as the emissary of chaos, and this is what the system could bring to Earth if it were to explode.
First appearing in telescopes in 2012, the star system wasn’t classified by researchers until recently because they could not plainly see it, reports Atlas Obscura. Benjamin Pope, a NASA Sagan Fellow at NYU describes seeing the amazing find clearly. “I just gasped. Nothing looks like this,” he told the publication.
Eight thousand light years away, Apep, composed of two massive Wolf-Rayet stars, is generating winds of 7.5 million miles per hour, hurling swirling dust through space and leaving crimson trails in its wake. The dust is expanding outward at a rate of 1 million miles per hour.
Currently, researchers are intrigued by the fact that this dust seems to be immune to the solar winds being generated by the stars. This could be a sign that the stars are becoming stressed from rapidly rotating and could explode at a scale unknown to humans. The explosion could peel back our planet’s ozone layer, leaving humans exposed to the harmful radiation of space and the sun.
Don’t worry, this exploding star system is, luckily, pointed away from planet Earth.
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