Jordi José, professor of DFEN, along with other researchers published an article in Nature

The steady vision of a starry night is challenged by the unexpected appearance of cosmic beacons, stellar explosions that shed light and matter to space. Among the rich zoo of stellar explosions, classical novae have captivated the interest of astronomers for decades. They are produced in stellar binary systems consisting of two stars, each having the mass of our Sun but separated only by a distance of the order of the Earth-Moon orbit. In such conditions, mass transfer episodes ensue, with streams of matter flowing towards the most compact component of the system: a white dwarf star, an object of planetary size. The piling up of matter on top of the white dwarf turns out to be unstable and a thermonuclear-driven explosion takes place. In the event, 10-5 - 10-4 solar mass of nuclear processed material