supernova tagged posts

Astronomers reveal the Largest Cosmic Explosion ever seen

Impression of black hole accretion
Artist impression of a black hole accretion. Credit John A. Paice

A team of astronomers led by the University of Southampton have uncovered the largest cosmic explosion ever witnessed.

The explosion is more than ten times brighter than any known supernova (exploding star) and three times brighter than the brightest tidal disruption event, where a star falls into a supermassive black hole.

The explosion, known as AT2021lwx, has currently lasted over three years, compared to most supernovae which are only visibly bright for a few months. It took place nearly 8 billion light years away, when the universe was around 6 billion years old, and is still being detected by a network of telescopes.

The researchers believe that the explosion is a result of a vast cloud of gas, possibly th...

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Red-Supergiant Supernova: Secrets of an Earlier Universe

Four images of supernova exploding
Panels A-D (clockwise from upper left) show several different stages of the supernova: the location of the host galaxy after the supernova faded, the three images of the host galaxy and the supernova at different phases in its evolution, the three different faces of the evolving supernova, and the different colors of the cooling supernova. Photo credit: Wenlei Chen, NASA

Detailed telescope images help scientists learn more about the Universe two billion years after the Big Bang. An international research team led by the University of Minnesota Twin Cities has measured the size of a star dating back 2 billion years after the Big Bang, or more than 11 billion years ago...

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A Fast-moving Star is Colliding with Interstellar Gas, creating a spectacular Bow Shock

A multi-wavelength view of Zeta Ophiuchi. Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Dublin Inst. Advanced Studies/S. Green et al.; Infrared: NASA/JPL/Spitzer

Zeta Ophiuchi has had an interesting life. It began as a typical large star about twenty times more massive than the sun. It spent its days happily orbiting a large companion star until its companion exploded as a supernova about a million years ago. The explosion ejected Zeta Ophiuchi, so now it is speeding away through interstellar space. Of course, the supernova also expelled the outer layers of the companion star, so rather than empty space, our plucky star is speeding through the remnant gas as well. As they say on Facebook, it’s complicated. And that’s great news for astronomers, as a recent study shows.

Zeta Ophiuchi is most famous for be...

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Supernova Reveals Secrets to Astronomers

This schematic of Supernova 2014C shows the various ejecta and winds (red and purple) given off by the exploding star (left, yellow). The common-envelope disk (blue) surrounds both stars, the one exploding as a supernova and its binary partner (not shown). The boundary layer around the common-envelope disk is the source of the hydrogen the team detected. (credit: B. Thomas et al./UT Austin)  

An international group of astronomers led by Benjamin Thomas of The University of Texas at Austin has used observations from the Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET) at the university’s McDonald Observatory to unlock a puzzling mystery about a stellar explosion discovered several years ago and evolving even now...

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