supernova explosion tagged posts

After its “birth” in the Big Bang, the universe consisted mainly of hydrogen and a few helium atoms. These are the lightest elements in the periodic table. More-or-less all elements heavier than helium were produced in the 13.8 billion years between the Big Bang and the present day.

Stars have produced many of these heavier elements through the process of nuclear fusion. However, this only makes elements as heavy as iron. The creation of any heavier elements would consume energy instead of releasing it.

In order to explain the presence of these heavier elements today, it’s necessary to find phenomena that can produce them. One type of event that fits the bill is a gamma-ray burst (GRB)—the most powerful class of explosion in the universe...

Astronomers have found dramatic evidence that a black hole or neutron star spiraled its way into the core of a companion star and caused that companion to explode as a supernova. The astronomers were tipped off by data from the Very Large Array Sky Survey (VLASS), a multi-year project using the National Science Foundation’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA).

“Theorists had predicted that this could happen, but this is the first time we’ve actually seen such an event,” said Dillon Dong, a graduate student at Caltech and lead author on a paper reporting the discovery in the journal Science.

The first clue came when the scientists examined images from VLASS, which began observations in 2017, and found an object brightly emitting radio waves but ...

New research suggests most of Earth’s heavy metals were spewed from a largely overlooked kind of star explosion called a collapsar. That gold on your ring finger is stellar – and not just in a complimentary way.

In a finding that may overthrow our understanding of where Earth’s heavy elements such as gold and platinum come from, new research by a University of Guelph physicist suggests that most of them were spewed from a largely overlooked kind of star explosion far away in space and time from our planet.

Some 80 per cent of the heavy elements in the universe likely formed in collapsars, a rare but heavy element-rich form of supernova explosion from the gravitational collapse of old, massive stars typicall...

Magnetohydrodynamic turbulence powered by neutrino-driven convection behind the stalled shock of a core-collapse supernova simulation. This simulation shows that the presence of rotation and weak magnetic fields dramatically impacts the development of the supernova mechanism as compared to non-rotating, non-magnetic stars. The nascent neutron star is just barely visible in the center below the turbulent convection. Credit: Sean M. Couch, Michigan State University

Michigan State University researchers are using Mira to perform large-scale 3D simulations of the final moments of a supernova’s life cycle...