Latest Supernova Stories
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online The European Space Agency (ESA) has released an image of the cauldron bubble as seen by its XMM-Newton space telescope. The cauldron bubble lies 5,000 light-years away from Earth, and is a bubble bursting with the fiery stellar wind of a star. Sitting in the constellation of Canis Major, the bubble spans nearly 60 light-years across and was blown by the stellar wind of the Wolf Rayet star HD 50896. This pink star is near the...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Astronomer J. Craig Wheeler reports in The Astrophysical Journal that he has a new theory on the identity of the "parents" of Type Ia supernovae. Wheeler said that current theories of Type Ia parents do not correctly match up with telescope data on actual supernovae. There are two models today that attempt to explain how Type Ia supernovae are born, the first being "single-degenerate model." In this model, a binary star is made...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Radioactive titanium associated with supernova remnant 1987A has been directly detected by ESA's Integral space observatory. The glowing remnant around the exploded star has likely been powered by the decaying from this titanium for the last 20 years. The first space observatory that can simultaneously observe objects in gamma rays, X-rays and visible light, Integral's principal targets are violent explosions known as gamma ray...
WASHINGTON, Oct. 5, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- NASA's Swift satellite recently detected a rising tide of high-energy X-rays from a source toward the center of our Milky Way galaxy. The outburst, produced by a rare X-ray nova, announced the presence of a previously unknown stellar-mass black hole. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) "Bright X-ray novae are so rare that they're essentially once-a-mission events and this is the first one Swift has seen,"...
redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online A team of Japanese researchers has discovered evidence that a yellow supergiant (YSG) was, in fact, the progenitor for a recently discovered supernova -- a discovery which they say raises serious questions regarding our understanding of the evolution of massive stars. Melina Bersten of the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU) and colleagues analyzed evidence and discovered that supernova...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Just over 1,000 years ago, one of the brightest stellar events ever recorded in history occurred. Between April 30 and May 1, 1006, a supernova was widely observed by a number of civilizations across the globe. Now, more than a thousand years later, a research team led by the University of Barcelona, the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (IAC) and the Instituto de Ciencia de Materiales de Madrid (CSIC) has determined that SN 1006 was...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Astronomer Fabrice Mottez made a series of predictions at the European Planetary Science Congress about the properties of planetary systems around pulsars. Pulsars are dense balls of matter which are heavier than the Sun, yet only are a few tens of miles in diameter. They rotate rapidly, and give off a bright flashing light, giving them their name "pulsating star." So far, there have been two pulsars observed that are home to...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online [ Watch the Video: Zooming in on the Pencil Nebula ] It seems a little early to already start decorating for Halloween, but the European Space Observatory has decided that it's never too early for a nebula shaped like a witch's broom. A new image of the Pencil Nebula shows a cloud of glowing gas making up part of a huge ring of wreckage left over after a supernova explosion that took place about 11,000 years ago. ESO has...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A bright new star outshone even Jupiter in 1604 and then it dimmed over several weeks. Johannes Kepler and other sky watchers witnessed this event, and centuries later, the debris left from this stellar explosion is known at the Kepler supernova remnant. Astronomers have studied the Kepler supernova remnant for a long time trying to determine exactly what happened when the star exploded. New analysis of a long observation by NASA's...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Astronomers have measured the largest-ever magnetic field around a massive star and reported their findings in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The team used the Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET) at The University of Texas McDonald Observatory and the Canada-France Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) on Hawaii's Mauna Kea to determine that the star's magnetic field is 20,000 times stronger than the Sun's. The magnetic...
Latest Supernova Reference Libraries
Supernova Remnant -- A supernova remnant (SNR) is made up of the materials left behind by the gigantic explosion of a star in a supernova. There are two possible routes to this end: either a massive star may cease to generate fusion energy in its core, and collapse inward under the force of its own gravity, or a white dwarf star may accumulate material from a companion star until it reaches a critical mass and undergoes a similar collapse. In either case, the resulting supernova...
Supernova -- A supernova is a star that increases its brightness drastically within a matter of days, making it appear as if a "new" star was born (hence "nova"). The "super" prefix distinguishes it from a mere nova, which also involves a star increasing in brightness, though to a lesser extent and through a much different mechanism. Astronomers have classified supernovae in several classes, according to the lines of different elements that appear in their spectra. The first...
Stellar Evolution -- Stellar evolution is the process of formation, life, and death of stars. It is one of the major topics of cosmogony. Star Birth and Life A star starts out as an enormous cloud of gas and dust many light-years across. Star formation begins when the cloud begins to condense under its own gravity. The processes that initiate this contraction are not fully understood. The cloud fragments fuse into stellar mass clouds known as protostars. Protostars do not emit...
Nova -- A nova is an enormous nuclear explosion caused by the accretion of hydrogen onto the surface of a white dwarf star. When a white dwarf has a close companion star, the companion will often begin to have its outer atmosphere drawn away from it by the white dwarf's gravity as the companion star ages and expands into a red giant. The gases so captured consist primarily of hydrogen and helium, the two principle constituents of matter in the universe. The gases are compacted on the...
Magnetar -- A magnetar is a neutron star with a strong magnetic field. The theory around these objects was formulated by Robert Duncan and Christopher Thompson. When in a supernova a star collapses to a neutron star, its magnetic field increases dramatically in strength. Duncan and Thompson calculated that the magnetic field of a neutron star, normally an already enormous 1012 tesla could under certain circumstances grow even larger, to about 1015 tesla. Such a highly magnetic neutron...
