supernova tagged posts

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...

The yellow arrow marks the superluminous supernova DES15E2mlf in this false-color image of the surrounding field. North is up and east is left. This image was observed with the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) gri-band filters mounted on the Blanco 4-meter telescope on Dec. 28, 2015, around the time when the supernova reached its peak luminosity. Credit: Observers: D. Gerdes and S. Jouvel

At a distance of 10 billion light years, a supernova detected by the Dark Energy Survey team is one of the most distant ever discovered and confirmed. The death of a massive star in a distant galaxy 10 billion years ago created a rare superluminous supernova that astronomers say is one of the most distant ever discovered...

Pre-supernova stars may show signs of instability for months before the big explosion. Credit: Weizmann Institute of Science

Pre-supernova stars may show signs of instability for months before the big explosion, spewing material into space and creating a dense gas shell around themselves, report scientists in a new report. In the most common type of supernova, the iron core of a massive star suddenly collapses in on itself and the outer layers are thrown out into space in a spectacular explosion. New research led by Weizmann Institute of Science researchers shows that the stars that become core-collapse supernovae might already exhibit instability for several months before the big event, spewing material into space and creating a dense gas shell around themselves...