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    Red-Supergiant Supernova: Secrets of an Earlier Universe

    November 10, 2022, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    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

    August 2, 2022, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    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

    April 28, 2022, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    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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    Astronomers Spot the Same Supernova Three Times—and Predict a Fourth Sighting in 16 years

    September 14, 2021, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Now you see them, now you don’t. Three views of the same supernova appear in the 2016 image on the left, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. But they’re gone in the 2019 image. The distant supernova, named Requiem, is embedded in the giant galaxy cluster MACS J0138. The cluster is so massive that its powerful gravity bends and magnifies the light from the supernova, located in a galaxy far behind it. Called gravitational lensing, this phenomenon also splits the supernova’s light into multiple mirror images, highlighted by the white circles in the 2016 image. The multiply imaged supernova disappears in the 2019 image of the same cluster, at right. The snapshot, taken in 2019, helped astronomers confirm the object’s pedigree. Supernovae explode and fade away over time...
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