Word: supernovae
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...sure that there was some plate flaw on it," Shelton says, "but it was no flaw." He walked outside, looked up at the Large Magellanic Cloud and, without a telescope or binoculars, clearly saw the exploding star, or supernova. While hundreds of supernovas occurring in incredibly distant galaxies have been spotted by powerful telescopes, this was the first one visible to the naked eye since 1885. More important, at a distance of only 170,000 light-years, it was the brightest one to appear in terrestrial skies since...
Another report in last week's Nature, while not dealing with 1987A, provided further insight into Type II supernovas. A group led by Chemist Edward Anders and Physicist Roy Lewis, both of the University of Chicago, revealed that they had discovered an abundance of submicroscopic diamonds in a meteorite that fell in Mexico in 1969. While the impact of a meteor slamming into the earth creates enough pressure to crystallize carbon into diamonds, the tiny samples found by the Chicago team apparently resulted from an ancient supernova. The evidence: they contained atomic forms of the gas xenon different from...
...shock waves from an ancient supernova sparked the creation of the sun and planets, Anders concludes, "it's very likely that the material from which our solar system was formed was contaminated with these diamonds. The diamonds on earth may well be a mixture of those loaded with xenon and those without...
Still, it was the big diamond in the sky, 1987A, that was getting most of the attention last week. While the supernova shines in southern hemisphere skies, most of the world's astronomers are in the northern half of the world, and they are scrambling to find ways of viewing 1987A directly rather than vicariously through the reports of others. Says Laurence Peterson, of NASA's astrophysics division, host of the brainstorming meeting at Goddard: "Hundreds of scientists are working on ideas." One proposal: temporarily base NASA's Kuiper Airborne Observatory, which is aboard a customized Lockheed C-141 StarLifter...
Some astronomers are in less of a hurry, figuring that the best is yet to come. Says Woosley: "Once the photosphere ((the supernova's luminous surface layer)) is gone, that's when it gets interesting." When that shell thins out, months or years from now, astronomers will be able to look inside and "see" the newly born, rapidly spinning neutron star, but with a radio telescope rather than the optical kind...