Type Ia supernovas tagged posts

The Perseus galaxy cluster, located about 240 million light-years away, is shown in this composite of visible light (green and red) and near-infrared images from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Unseen here is a thin, hot, X-ray-emitting gas that fills the cluster. Credit: Robert Lupton and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Consortium

Thanks to an in-depth look into the composition of gas in the Perseus galaxy cluster, Japan’s Hitomi mission has given scientists new insights into the stellar explosions that formed its chemical elements. Before its brief mission ended unexpectedly in March 2016, Japan’s Hitomi X-ray observatory captured exceptional information about the motions of hot gas in the Perseus galaxy cluster...

Scientists have detected the first X-rays from what appears to be a type Ia supernova, located inside the spiral-shaped galaxy ESO 336-G009, about 260 million light-years from Earth. Credit: Vikram Dwarkadas/Digitized Sky Survey

Exploding stars carry a cloak of dense material that puzzles astronomers. A team of scientists, including scholars from the University of Chicago, appear to have found the first X-rays coming from type Ia supernovae. Astronomers are fond of type Ia supernovas, created when a white dwarf star in a two-star system undergoes a thermonuclear explosion, because they burn at a specific brightness. This allows scientists to calculate how far away they are from Earth, and thus to map distances in the universe...

Supernova G1.9+0.3. Credit: NASA/CXC/CfA/S. Chakraborti et al.

Scientists have used data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the NSF’s Jansky Very Large Array to determine the likely trigger for the most recent supernova in the Milky Way. They applied a new technique that could have implications for understanding other Type Ia supernovas, a class of stellar explosions that scientists use to determine the expansion rate of the Universe.

Astronomers had previously identified G1.9+0.3 as the remnant of the most recent supernova in our Galaxy, Type Ia category. It is estimated to have occurred about 110 years ago in a dusty region of the Galaxy that blocked visible light from reaching Earth...