Word: supernovae
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...pulsars, those superdense, fast-spinning celestial objects that appear to blink on and off as % often as every millisecond. Now the mystery seems to be solved. Last week an international team of astronomers announced that they had detected a pulsar emerging from the murky dust clouds left over from Supernova 1987A, a giant star that exploded about 170,000 light-years from earth and was first seen two years...
...these phenomena is because they are theorized to be the source of all heavy elements in the universe. When the stellar explosion takes place, it fuses all of the star's abudant light elements, like hydrogen and helium, into heavy elements, like iron. "There is a real sense that supernova elements are actually the physical origin of [the heavy] chemicals in our body," Kirshner says. The elements these supernovae create are in everything, he says, including "life, earth, iron and gold...
Recent advances in technology have made observation for astronomers like Kirshner more effective. To take pictures of the light spectra of a supernova "it used to be photographic plates, but now we're using CCD's [Charge Couple Devise] that are the same that are in a home video camera." He says the CCD's are extremely sensitive to light and so are of immense use in detecting distant remnants...
Early next month, Puppis A will be studied more extensively at Cerro Tololo. "We'll see if it stands up to closer scrutiny," Kirshner says, though he will not be in Chile for the continuing observation of his hypothesized double supernova, he says. Next semester he will be teaching the Core course, Science A-35, "Matter in the Universe," and says he needs to stay in town "for sectioning and stuff like that...
Kirshner says he has worked with supernovae for the past 17 years, ever since he started his graduate work in California. But even as a junior concentrator in Harvard's undergraduate Astronomy Department, Kirshner decided to focus on his present specialty, when he took a tutorial on the Crab Nebula, a supernova remnant...