Latest Hypernova Stories

Black holes could produce the enormous energies of a burst, but not neutron starsA gamma-ray burst is an immensely powerful blast of high-energy light thought to be generated by a collapsing star in a distant galaxy, but what this collapse leaves behind has been a matter of debate.A new analysis of four extremely bright bursts observed by NASA's Fermi satellite suggests that the remnant from a long-duration gamma-ray burst is most likely a black hole "“ not a rapidly spinning, highly...

Gamma-ray bursts are by far the brightest and most powerful explosions in the Universe, second only to the Big Bang itself. So it might seem a bit surprising that a group of them has gone missing.A single gamma-ray burst (GRB) can easily outshine an entire galaxy containing hundreds of billions of stars. Powerful telescopes can see them from clear across the Universe. And because the deeper you look into space, the farther back in time you see, astronomers should be able to see GRBs from the...

People of the 'Deep South' love a good story and they're about to get a doozy. It begins next week when researchers from 25 countries converge on Huntsville, Alabama, to share the latest findings on the biggest explosions since the Big Bang itself. The 6th Huntsville Gamma-ray Burst Symposium 2008 convenes Oct. 20th and the talking won't stop for four straight days.One speaker after another will take the audience on a wild ride from the edge of the observable Universe, where gamma-ray bursts...

Gamma-ray bursts, powerful glares of high-energy that wash through the Universe once every day or so are, for a brief time, the brightest objects in the gamma-ray sky. ESA's Integral gamma-ray observatory has observed several low-luminosity gamma-ray bursts, confirming the existence of an entire population of weaker bursts hardly noticed so far.When it comes to detecting gamma-ray bursts (or GRBs), Integral is equipped with the most sensitive detector ever launched into space "“ the IBIS...

A European-led team of astronomers are providing hints that a recent supernova may not be as normal as initially thought. Instead, the star that exploded is now understood to have collapsed into a black hole, producing a weak jet, typical of much more violent events, the so-called gamma-ray bursts. The object, SN 2008D, is thus probably among the weakest explosions that produce very fast moving jets. This discovery represents a crucial milestone in the understanding of the most violent...

By Luntz, Stephen A beautiful star system may eventually be a threat to Earth, although its discoverer stresses that the risk is small. Wolf-Rayet stars are considered the time bombs of the galaxy, likely to explode as supernovae in astronomically short timescales. They are enormous - generally tens of solar masses - and shedding material 100 billion times as fast as the Sun. Being close to a supernova is a health hazard for a living planet, but from a few hundred light-years away all one...

Peering across 7.5 billion light-years and halfway back to the Big Bang, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has photographed the fading optical counterpart of a powerful gamma ray burst that holds the record for being the intrinsically brightest naked-eye object ever seen from Earth. For nearly a minute this single star was as bright as 10 million galaxies. Hubble Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) images of GRB 080319B, taken on Monday, April 7, show the fading optical counterpart of the...

The brightest stellar explosion ever recorded may be a long-sought new type of supernova, according to observations by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and ground-based optical telescopes. This discovery indicates that violent explosions of extremely massive stars were relatively common in the early universe, and that a similar explosion may be ready to go off in our own galaxy. "This was a truly monstrous explosion, a hundred times more energetic than a typical supernova," said...

Scientists recently made a discovery that forced them to re-think their theories on the most powerful explosions in the cosmos - gamma ray bursts. A year ago scientists thought they had figured out the nature of gamma-ray bursts. They signal the birth of black holes and traditionally, fall into one of two categories: long or short. A newly discovered hybrid burst has properties of both known classes of gamma-ray bursts yet possesses features that remain unexplained.The long bursts are those...

Unusual Gamma-Ray Burst Studied in Detail Astronomers, using ESO's Very Large Telescope, have for the first time made the link between an X-ray flash and a supernova. Such flashes are the little siblings of gamma-ray bursts (GRB) and this discovery suggests the existence of a population of events less luminous than 'classical' GRBs, but possibly much more numerous. "This extends the GRB-supernova connection to X-ray flashes and fainter supernovae, implying a common origin," said...