supernova tagged posts

Artist impression of a Fast Radio Burst (FRB) reaching Earth. The colors represent the burst arriving at different radio wavelengths, with long wavelengths (red) arriving several seconds after short wavelengths (blue). This delay is called dispersion and occurs when radio waves travel through cosmic plasma. Credit: Jingchuan Yu, Beijing Planetarium

Origin of a Fast Radio Burst has been tied to to a highly magnetized, gas-filled region of space, providing a new hint in the decade-long quest to explain the mysterious radio pulses. “We now know that the energy from this particular burst passed through a dense magnetized field shortly after it formed,” says Kiyoshi Masui...

This illustration of the region surrounding our Solar System shows the estimated location of the two-million-year-old supernova, lying close to the galactic magnetic field, that may have been the source for some high-energy cosmic rays observed today. Credit: Michael Kachelrieß, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)

High-energy protons, nuclei, and other particles are constantly showering down on Earth’s atmosphere from space, but the origins of these cosmic rays is unknown. One possibility is that the cosmic rays come from supernovae, although the evidence for this claim is limited...

Gamma ray bursts (GRBs) – flashes of high-energy light occur about once a day, randomly, from around the sky – the brightest events in the known universe. While a burst is underway, it is many millions of times brighter than an entire galaxy. Astronomers are anxious to decipher their nature not only because of their dramatic energetics, but also because their tremendous brightness enables them to be seen across cosmological distances and times, providing windows into the young universe.

GRB 130427A tops the charts as one of the brightest ever seen.
There appear to be 2 general types of GRBs: those associated with the deaths of massive stars, and ones believed to originate from the coalescence of 2 extreme objects (neutron stars or black holes) that had been orbiting each other in a binary...