supernova

NASA's Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope spent a year collecting data from a thousand gamma ray sources and came up with this, the best map to date of the extreme universe. It also gave Einstein a shot in the arm by confirming the scientist's theories of space-time.

[ Read Full Story ]

Observing a star up close (putting aside for a moment how you’d get there or withstand its heat) is probably like sitting beside an enormous silent fire. Sounds—which are simply pressure variations in a medium such as air or water—can’t propagate in the vacuum of space, so the roiling surface of a star would make an impression on the eyes, but not the ears.

[ Read Full Story ]

Good news for astrophysicists and fans of massive thermonuclear explosions alike: a team of mathematicians at the DOE's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, working alongside two astrophysicists from Stony Brook University and U.C. Santa Cruz, have modeled the hours leading up to a Type Ia supernova, capturing the gritty details of the cataclysmic death of a white dwarf star for the first time.

[ Read Full Story ]

Meet pair-instability supernova SN2006GY, the most extraordinary explosion in the cosmos. Unlike its smaller, regular supernova cousins, which blast off the outer layers of a star and pack what remains into a neutron core or a black hole, the pair-instability supernova is a much more violent celestial finale. These events happen only in stars that are at least 150 times as large as our sun and result in total annihilation of the star. Astrophysicists contend that this type of eruption helped seed the cosmos with heavy metals like iron, a process that ultimately allowed planets to form.

[ Read Full Story ]

Astronomers using the Arecibo telescope have discovered a fast-rotating pulsar that doesn't fit the accepted notions of how those exotic, lighthouse-like stellar objects form. Pulsars get their name from the brief beams of light they shoot our way every few milliseconds or more.

[ Read Full Story ]