supernova tagged posts

An international team of researchers has found that neon inside a certain massive star can consume the electrons in the core, a process called electron capture, which causes the star to collapse into a neutron star and produce a supernova.

The researchers were interested in studying the final fate of stars within a mass range of eight to 10 solar masses, or eight to 10 times the mass of the sun. This mass range is important because it includes the boundary between whether a star has a large enough mass to undergo a supernova explosion to form a neutron star, or has a smaller mass to form a white dwarf star without becoming a supernova.

An eight- to 1...

Here on Earth, we pay quite a lot of attention to the sun. It’s visible to us, after all, and central to our lives. But it is only one of the billions of stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way. It’s also quite small compared to other stars—many are at least eight times more massive.

These massive stars influence the structure, shape and chemical content of a galaxy. And when they have exhausted their hydrogen gas fuel and die, they do so in an explosive event called a supernova. This explosion is sometimes so strong that it triggers the formation of new stars out of materials in the dead star’s surroundings.

But there’s an important gap in our knowledge: as...

Astronomers announced that they have identified the type of companion star that made its partner in a binary system, a carbon-oxygen white dwarf star, explode. Through repeated observations of SN 2015cp, a supernova 545 million light years away, the team detected hydrogen-rich debris that the companion star had shed prior to the explosion.

Many stars explode as luminous supernovae when, swollen with age, they run out of fuel for nuclear fusion...

Artist impression of the “reverse shock” echoing back though the jets of the gamma-ray burst (GRB 161219B).
Credit: NRAO/AUI/NSF, S. Dagnello

ALMA creates its first-ever movie of cosmic explosion. In the blink of an eye, a massive star more than 2 billion light-years away lost a million-year-long fight against gravity and collapsed, triggering a supernova and forming a black hole at its center. This newborn black hole belched a fleeting yet astonishingly intense flash of gamma rays known as a gamma-ray burst (GRB) toward Earth, where it was detected by NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory on 19 December 2016.

While the gamma rays from the burst disappeared from view a scant seven seconds later, longer wavelengths of light from the explosion – including X-ray, visible light, and radio – con...