The Star That Exploded Without Hydrogen

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Twenty five years ago a star in the constellation Puppis blew itself apart and then vanished behind a curtain of its own soot.

Astronomers knew only that the explosion contained no hydrogen at all, which for the most abundant element in the universe is a very strange absence.

Now the dust has finally thinned, and the culprits have stepped into view, a white dwarf quietly stripping a rare helium star of its substance.

But the emerging picture came with something nobody expected, clumps of gas tearing outwards at twenty million miles an hour, of a kind never seen in any other nova.

Nobody yet knows what fired them.