The destructive and awesome power of a supernova may not just leave a black hole behind, but may also give way to "zombie stars."

According to Space.com, astronomers using NASA's Hubble Telescope reported their findings in the journal Nature. They identified the new kind of star explosion as a Type Iax supernova, which occurs when a dying white dwarf is fueled by another star.

The astronomers are still unsure of how these highly exceptional stellar blasts originate but the supernova apparently leaves behind a living remnant, hence the term "zombie star."

"Astronomers have been searching for decades for the star systems that produce Type Ia supernova explosions," study co-author Saurabh Jha, of Rutgers University, said in a press release. "Type Ia's are important because they're used to measure vast cosmic distances and the expansion of the universe. But we have very few constraints on how any white dwarf explodes.

"The similarities between Type Iax's and normal Type Ia's make understanding Type Iax progenitors important, especially because no Type Ia progenitor has been conclusively identified. This discovery shows us one way that you can get a white dwarf explosion."

Supernovas are the most powerful explosions known to occur in the universe. They mark the destruction of a star and leave a black hole in their place, but the light from the blast is often bright enough to eclipse an entire galaxy.

"We were tremendously excited to see a progenitor system for this supernova," study lead author Curtis McCully, an astronomer at Rutgers, told Space.com. "No one had ever seen a progenitor system for a white-dwarf supernova in pre-explosion data, so our expectation was that we wouldn't see anything. Nature surprised us, which is always exciting.

"I was very surprised to see anything at the location of the supernova."

The team of scientists plans to continue their work with the Hubble Telescope in 2015, that way the explosion's light can fade enough to reveal potential zombie stars.

"Back in 2009, when we were just starting to understand this class, we predicted these supernovae were produced by a white dwarf and helium star binary system," Ryan Foley, of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said in the release. "There's still a little uncertainty in this study, but it is essentially validation of our claim."