Word: supernovae
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...cosmos. The dispatch may move at the speed of light, but the journey can still take hours, years, epochs--turning current events into history long before we ever learn of them. Signals from the Cassini spacecraft, currently studying Saturn's moons, take 84 min. to reach us; the supernova whose cataclysmic birth astronomers observed earlier this year was already fading millions of years...
...have made everything we know on Earth—including us—and could provide clues to the ultimate fate of the universe. And last week, a team led by Harvard astronomers announced they had seen such shrapnel. What the team observed was a stellar explosion, called a supernova, that was caused by the merger and collision of two white dwarf stars—the shriveled-up remnants of burnt-out stars. Typically, these gigantic explosions are thought to involve only one white dwarf, and astronomers have inferred from previous studies of white dwarf supernovae that the rate...
Remember the supernova, that great burst of sky violence that was supposed to be the finest pyrotechnics show the heavens could offer? Forget it. NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory and several ground-based optical telescopes have just witnessed a cosmic blast that makes the supernova look like a popgun...
...that will appear in an upcoming issue of the Astrophysical Journal, took place 240 million light-years away and was, in the words of astronomer Nathan Smith of the University of California, Berkeley, a leader of the observing team, "truly monstrous." About 100 times as powerful as an ordinary supernova, it resulted from the death of a star that was probably 150 times as massive as our sun, or "as massive as a star can get," says Smith. What's more, a similarly huge and unstable star is rumbling a lot closer to Earth than we might like...
...apart from the more common variety by what happened in the center of the star as it was dying. Typically, a massive star exhausts the elemental fuel in its core and begins to collapse inward. The outer layers blow off in a huge flare we recognize as a supernova while the core becomes more and more compressed, eventually forming the infinitely dense node that is a black hole. In SN 2006gy, the sheer mass of the star produced so much core heat and gamma-ray radiation that it created matter and antimatter particle pairs. This blew the star to bits...