A Zombie White Dwarf Star is Born Again. Hallelujah!

A zombie white dwarf star, Sakurai's object, has experienced a powerful helium shell flash, causing it to swell, heat, and re-emerge as a star. The event occurred in 2026, and it has become six times hotter than before. The star, named after amateur astronomer Yukio Sakurai, is in the Sagittarius constellation and is undergoing a helium flash. The flash is rare to observe on human timescales, making Sakurai's object an important object for studying stellar evolution. The star is now a [WCL] type star, dominated by carbon and oxygen lines, and it is re-heating. Researchers used observations from the Very Large Telescope and models of expanding stellar atmospheres to determine its classification. The star's re-heating offers an ongoing opportunity to test stellar models against observations. The researchers concluded that the star is reheating more gradually than some earlier models predicted, providing insights into the evolution of dying stars.

• Sakurai's object is a white dwarf star that has experienced a helium shell flash, causing it to swell and heat up.
• The star is in the Sagittarius constellation and is undergoing a helium flash.
• The star is classified as a [WCL] type star, dominated by carbon and oxygen lines, and it is re-heating.

The helium flash caused the star to become six times hotter, and it is now re-heating. The star's re-heating offers an ongoing opportunity to test stellar models against observations. The researchers used observations from the Very Large Telescope and models of expanding stellar atmospheres to determine its classification. The star is classified as a [WCL] type star, dominated by carbon and oxygen lines, and it is re-heating. The star's re-heating offers an ongoing opportunity to test stellar models against observations. The researchers concluded that the star is reheating more gradually than some earlier models predicted, providing insights into the evolution of dying stars.

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