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    Type Ia supernovae tagged posts

    NASA’s Roman telescope will catch 100,000 explosions — and rewrite the Universe’s story

    July 24, 2025, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey infographic
    This infographic describes the High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey that will be conducted by NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. The survey’s main component will cover over 18 square degrees — a region of sky as large as 90 full moons — and see supernovae that occurred up to about 8 billion years ago. Smaller areas within the survey will pierce even farther, potentially back to when the universe was around a billion years old. The survey will be split between the northern and southern hemispheres, located in regions of the sky that will be continuously visible to Roman. The bulk of the survey will consist of 30-hour observations every five days for two years in the middle of Roman’s five-year primary mission.
    Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

    NASA’s Roman Space T...

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    Latest dark energy survey data suggest possible variations in dark energy over time

    March 20, 2025, Categories  Astronomy/Space, Physics

    Latest dark energy survey data suggest possible variations in dark energy over time
    The Dark Energy Camera (DECam), fabricated by the Department of Energy (DOE), is mounted on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in north-central Chile. Telescope construction started in 1969 with the casting of the primary mirror. The assembly at the Cerro Tololo mountaintop was finished in 1974. Upon completion of construction it was the 3rd largest telescope in the world, behind the 200-inch Hale telescope at Palomar Observatory in California and the BTA-6 in southern Russia, and was the largest in the Southern Hemisphere (a title that it held for 22 years). It was later named in 1995 in honor of Víctor M. Blanco, Puerto Rican astronomer and former director of CTIO. Credit: DOE/FNAL/DECam/R. Hahn/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA 

    A new...

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    Study using X-Ray Telescope indicates that Dark Energy is Uniformly Distributed in Space and Time

    May 4, 2023, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    eROSITA X-Ray study indicates that dark energy is uniformly distributed in space and time
    X-ray (over) and optical pseudo-color (below) images of three low mass clusters identified in the eFEDS survey data. The highest redshift cluster come from a time when the universe was approximately 10 billion years younger than today. The cluster galaxies in that case are clearly much redder than the galaxies in the other two clusters. Credit: eRosita

    When Edwin Hubble observed distant galaxies in the 1920s, he made the groundbreaking discovery that the universe is expanding. It was not until 1998, however, that scientists observing Type Ia supernovae further discovered that the universe is not just expanding but has begun a phase of accelerating expansion. “To explain this acceleration, we need a source,” says Joseph Mohr, astrophysicist at LMU...

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    Role of Supernovae in Clocking the Universe

    January 5, 2017, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Supernova G299

    New research confirms the role Type Ia supernovae, like G299 pictured above, play in measuring universe expansion. Courtesy ofNASAdownload

    New research by cosmologists at the University of Chicago and Wayne State University confirms the accuracy of Type Ia supernovae in measuring the pace at which the universe expands. The findings support a widely held theory that the expansion of the universe is accelerating and such acceleration is attributable to a mysterious force known as dark energy. The findings counter recent headlines that Type Ia supernova cannot be relied upon to measure the expansion of the universe.

    Using light from an exploding star as bright as entire galaxies to determine cosmic distances led to the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics...

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