supernovae tagged posts

Stars over eight times more massive than the Sun end their lives in supernovae explosions. The composition of the star influences what happens during the explosion.

A considerable number of massive stars have a close companion star. Led by researchers at Kyoto University, a team of international researchers observed that some stars exploding as supernovae may release part of their hydrogen layers to their companion stars before the explosion.

“In a binary star system, the star ...

The effects of a supernova – and possibly more than one – on large ocean life like school-bus-sized Megalodon 2.6 million years ago are detailed in a new article. About 2.6 million years ago, an oddly bright light arrived in the prehistoric sky and lingered there for weeks or months. It was a supernova some 150 light years away from Earth. Within a few hundred years, long after the strange light in the sky had dwindled, a tsunami of cosmic energy from that same shattering star explosion could have reached our planet and pummeled the atmosphere, touching off climate change and triggering mass extinctions of large ocean animals, including a shark species that was the size of a school bus.

The effects of such a supernova – and possibly more than ...

Unlike most stellar explosions that fade away, supernova SN 2012au continues to shine today thanks to a powerful new pulsar.
Credit: NASA, ESA, and J. DePasquale (STScI)

The explosions of stars, known as supernovae, can be so bright they outshine their host galaxies. They take months or years to fade away, and sometimes, the gaseous remains of the explosion slam into hydrogen-rich gas and temporarily get bright again – but could they remain luminous without any outside interference?

That’s what Dan Milisavljevic, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Purdue University, believes he saw six years after “SN 2012au” exploded...

This is an artist’s concept of the metric expansion of space, where space (including hypothetical non-observable portions of the universe) is represented at each time by the circular sections. Note on the left the dramatic expansion (not to scale) occurring in the inflationary epoch, and at the center the expansion acceleration. The scheme is decorated with WMAP images on the left and with the representation of stars at the appropriate level of development. Credit: NASA

Scientists have created computer simulations of events soon after the Big Bang to better understand how stars today are being formed. Researchers have formed the clearest picture yet of massive explosions that controlled the creation of galaxies, including our own, and continue to influence star formation today...